


How to Stop Time

by deliverusfromsburb



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood and Injury, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Minor Davesprite/Jade Harley, Yellow Yard, aro ace!John Egbert, more tags added as I progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2020-03-14 16:15:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 28
Words: 35,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18951613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: A boy, a witch, and a bird walk into a battleship.For three years, there is no punchline.





	1. Davesprite

**Author's Note:**

> I may never write the comprehensive yellow yard epic the bship crew deserves, but I can hit the highlights.  
> Expect updates to be sporadic.

**April 15, 2009 (Year One)**

“Stop _fussing_ ,” Jade says.

“Easy for you to say, you’re not the one getting manhandled by someone who printed their medical degree off the Internet as a tie-in to her manthrochaps. How much experience do you have with organic life forms?” You stop squirming as something occurs to you. “Am I an organic life form?”

She tilts her head, considering you at a molecular level. “Yup, plenty of carbon and hydrogen! More silicon than normal, but there are hypotheses about silicon-based life forms, so you can prove them right.”

“Show-off,” you mutter, even though it’s the kind of thing you’d find interesting, if it wasn’t you.

She’s checking your injuries again. Neither you nor John did Boy Scouts, so Jade is the closest thing to a medic you have. John’s grandmother can boost gel viscosity, but only for players, a category carapaces don’t fall under and you’ve fallen out of. You’d fend her off by saying you know how to care for your own sword wounds, but that might steer the conversation places you don’t want to go.

(You don’t think to ask how she knows so much about first aid either. She would have dodged the question with a silly comment and a smile, but at least you would have bothered to ask. You will regret that, in the end.)

So far Jade has picked at your gashes a few times with a lot of muttering to herself about whether arguing your molecules back into line is a good medical strategy or not. “I’m sorry,” she wailed after she’d been seeing to a Prospitian down part of an arm and you couldn’t help flinching when she bumped a torn muscle. “I’m trying. The vet books don’t say anything about chess people. There’s nothing in there about bleeding yellow!”

It took a moment, but then you demanded, “Vet books?”

“Grandpa only left me with so much reading material,” she countered, and you’re still alive, so you didn’t argue. You only hope she’ll have the decency not to open any archived WikiHow articles when you can see her doing it.

“Just hurry up, alright?” you say. “Jesus, and I thought I was the ex-Time hero. I’m pretty sure you’re reducing the trading value of a second big time, we’ll all come out of here with beards.”

Her dog ears had flattened against her skull the first time she saw your injuries, but now she just sticks her tongue out at you. “Can’t you speed it back up then, Mr. big time hero?”

“Nah, I’m fresh out of player powers. All I’ve got left is the documentation.” Ironically, being prototyped downloaded the instruction manual, so you understand the powers allotted to the Knight of Time better than you did after months of hands-on practice. You can sense where your powers used to be, a spot like a tooth knocked out. SBURB gave you a built-in calculator function, though. That’s something.

“We’ll have to get you to a physicists conference.” It’s appalling how chatty Jade can be with her hands covered in gore. “How time works is a big mystery.”

You suck in your stomach as she winds fresh gauze around it. “Sorry, it’s pretty thin on theory up here. All practical tips and tricks. I’d fail the written.”

“That’s too bad. There were some things I was curious about, even if apparently I have already mastered stopping time.” She strips off her gloves and tosses them into the bucket hovering by her elbow. “Like, is it true a new universe happens every time we make a decision?”

Dooming timelines works on that principle, but you have to want it. If worlds split every time you made any decision, there’d be enough of you to fill the NRG stadium. The image is relentless: time splintering into even more irreparable shards every time you take a breath, so many chances to go so off-track there’s no option but hitting the kill switch. “I hope not. If that’s true, time sort of breaks down, doesn’t it? Every second makes its own reality, leaves a hell of a mess for someone to sweep up later. If there’s that many of you, how do you know you’re the right one?”

“I don’t know, I kind of like the idea! If every time you made a choice another you did the opposite, then even if you make a mistake you know some version of you in another universe got it right. Someone got a happy ending.” She leans back. “All done! I’m starting to see signs of healing, we’ll leave that dressing on for a while.”

You reach down to pick at the bandages, and she slaps your hand away. Bro didn’t care if you peeled off your scabs. “That’s an optimistic way of looking at Time.”

She frowns. She’s changed out of her god tier uniform, but her newly alchemized shirt features the white spiral of Space splashed across her chest. “You don’t like your aspect?”

“Yours sounds like a better deal. You can go anywhere, fuck off to Mars if you need some alone time. If Mars hadn’t gotten caught up in the universal clearing sale, anyway.”

She banishes the biohazard bucket with a glowing hand. “Space is pretty neat. Although you can’t get away from it, no matter where you go. So I guess there are downsides to anything.”

“No, there’s no arguing with the fact that Breath is awesome,” John says.

You almost forgotten John was there, since he hasn’t said anything for a while. He’s got a good bedside manner when he wants to. Earlier he distracted carapaces from their checkups with magic tricks, but he hasn’t pulled out the deck of cards for you. Maybe the blood’s getting to him. Normally you would mind more yourself, but the Fanta yellow stuff seeping out of you is so unfamiliar that it doesn’t register. You’ve spent over twenty-four hours in this body. It’s starting to sink in that it’s permanent.

Other things still need to sink in. You keep stealing glances at John to remind yourself that he’s there. You’re the one who found his body crumpled in Typheus’ caverns. Rose wrote a five page eulogy only to rip it up a paragraph in and say, “This is stupid.” You’re not sure how to explain how jarring it is to live with dead friends, how part of you keeps expecting to wake up back in the reality where there is no happy ending for anyone. Jade might enjoy the concept of parallel universes, but you’ve seen enough to be turned off the idea.

“I can make tornadoes and take people flying in cars,” he continues. “What’s better than that?”

“I don’t know, one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe?” Fuck Time, but you feel perversely compelled to defend your former assigned team. “You don’t hear physicists going on about space, time, and light breezes.”

Jade heads off your debate. “I think I read something else about Breath when I was dreaming, but I don’t remember it. The game wouldn’t assign us aspects if they weren’t valuable.”

Instead of arguing, you usher them both out of your room. “Let me know if you notice any changes,” Jade calls over her shoulder, and you wave your hand in vague assent. When it comes to living with ghosts, she’s easier. You never saw a body, and you met part of her on the Battlefield meant to be your graves, wondering how after going another round you’d still ended up as other people’s leftovers. She is no one’s leftovers now, not since she lit up with a mandala of interlocking spirographs before plucking you and the rest of the planet out of the heavens and cupping you in her hand. After the initial lightshow, she doesn’t look the part of goddess. She’s gangly and awkward like her brother in the way some people are who are going to grow up to be gorgeous, once they’re done things like getting a bit older and having access to real food and sunlight again. By the time that shift happens, though, you won’t notice, because you won’t be what you could call an objective observer. And for now, all you can see is dead friends.

Living with two gods could be intimidating. Good thing you’ve never been the religious type.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full disclosure: As long as this remains within the yellow yard, it should be canon compliant for the original timeline. If I move past those three years, it will diverge.


	2. Jade

**May 25, 2009 (Year One)**

There are lots of things you don’t miss about your island. The way the world moved on without you, Dave and John and Rose making pop culture references you didn’t understand and quoting facts that didn’t match up with your history books. (News of a new war in the Middle East surprised you; you didn’t know the last one had ended.) The way the heat sent mildew creeping over every surface and you were only one girl not tall enough to reach into every corner of every room and keep things clean. Sometimes you felt like a creature trapped in a shell too big for it that was slowly crumbling. You don’t miss the loneliness. You have a friend and a brother now who are only a shout away.

You are beginning, however, to miss the space. You could rush outside and let the surf tickle your toes, watch birds wheel overhead, climb a tree and dangle upside down hanging on with your knees. Battleships are not built for comfort. You bang your head on the low doorways and spend more time on the upper deck wishing for stars instead of the endless blur of green. In three years, you’re afraid you might fossilize like one of the items in Dave’s collection, buried under layers of settled dirt, bones invaded by stone.

Davesprite, you correct yourself. He didn’t seem to mind the short version on the Battlefield, but he’s snippy about it here. “I’m not him, ok?” he said. “I’m not a replacement.”

You hadn’t meant it like that, but it’s a simple enough change to make, even if the suffix sits strangely on your tongue. If your dream self had felt that way as a sprite, you don’t remember. Those memories are faint, and you prefer them that way. Why dredge up old embarrassments?

You do your best to make the cold yellow hull come alive by hanging potted plants from the ceiling and alchemizing trailing, glittery dresses you never could have worn on the island. The dresses get grungy immediately when you find the engine rooms and familiarize yourself with the mechanisms keeping the place running. John finds you dozing on the sofa clad in a gold-sequined ball gown, combat boots, and gardening gloves and shakes his head. You don’t see the problem, especially since he’s the one who delivered the lecture about clothing being mandatory when you’re around other people. It would be nice if he would make up his mind.

The activity keeps you busy. The carapaces who joined your flight form their own community that keeps a polite distance from the three of you, although John’s grandmother makes sure they’re supplied with platters of sliced vegetables scavenged from the farms dotting the Battlefield. One day, you almost slam into a Prospitian while turning a sharp corner.

_Sorry,_ you sign automatically, fist to your chest.

His black eyes widen. _You have nothing to be sorry for._

You bite your lip. It had been an apology for the near collision (a goddess of Space should pay more attention than that, but your head retains its habit of being lost in the clouds). Even so, you have plenty to be sorry for. None of the Prospitians aboard are ones you recognize. The queen exiled herself without saying goodbye. She’d been the closest thing you had to a mother, but maybe to her you were one more pawn.

You asked her once why you couldn’t stay. Storms had been pounding your island for a week straight, trapping you inside. Bec liked chasing lightning strikes, so you’d curled up alone in your bedroom, feeling the tower sway in the gale. It was a relief to open your eyes in the golden kingdom of your dreams. _I’d be good_ , you told her. _I know how to take care of myself. I could be useful. I can do repairs, I know first aid, I just learned about trigonometry_. You fumbled for a sign for that one and settled for _harder math_.

She shook her head. You were shifting from foot to foot, trying to keep moving like that would prevent your waking up. None of those tricks ever seemed to work. It was easier to make yourself fall asleep. You fell asleep when you didn’t want to, sometimes. _We don’t need you to do any of that here._

The carapaces led simple lives. Fleets of agents accomplished necessary tasks: a place for everyone and everyone in their place. Couldn’t she see your place should be with her? You searched for reasons for her to let you stay. _I could watch the clouds for longer. You said that was important._

The queen looked out a window toward Skaia’s shimmering radiance. _It is. But so is your time spent waking. You must meet the others._

You’d seen the boy sleeping in the tower next to yours, and you’d caught glimpses of another boy and girl with pale hair in the clouds. You could meet them now if they would only wake up, but the other Prospit dreamer ignored your covert shakes and pinches. They felt more like imaginary friends than real people. It was hard to believe you’d ever know their names. _When will I meet them?_

_I don’t know._ She’d been telling you that a lot ever since you started asking more questions. What was the point of being in charge if you didn’t know anything? She didn’t act like it bothered her, so you tried to bury your frustration under a shell that was just as strong and smooth. Princesses could stand as tall and unflappable as queens. _That’s why it’s important for you to be there and ready when it’s time._

That was worth waking up for, you guessed. _Will I ever get to visit you for real? Not just when I’m sleeping?_

_I hope so, my princess._ Her eyes turned up at the corners in that way that meant a smile, and she touched your cheek before continuing. _Watch the clouds, and maybe we’ll get lucky._

You didn’t get lucky. The moon didn’t last long enough for you to walk down its golden streets with John like you had hoped, and what is left of the planet has been left behind. You hope the citizens you met during your childhood escaped some other way. When you buried the bodies strewn across the Battlefield with a green-edged hand, you did not look at the faces.

_I’m sorry didn’t save Prospit,_ you tell this survivor now.

_You are our witch,_ he says. _You will save us in the end_. Then he scuttles past you. In your dreaming days, Prospitians were happy to stay and chat or reach to touch the edge of your gown. A palace librarian sat next to you and taught you how to sound out long words, even though carapaces prefer to talk with their hands most of the time. Minstrels would pluck at lutes or pipe harmonies while you strummed at your bass with two real and two imagined hands. Now you’re beyond them. _Our witch_ , he’d called you. You miss being their princess.

Even after Prospit tumbled from the sky, they still believe in you. Does anyone else worry about being locked in a floating box powered by a teenage girl who just got her powers?  If you tumbled out of the sky, would you hit the ground? Future archaeologists could find you crushed into your metal prison like dinosaur skeletons reduced to rocky memories of themselves, curiosities to brush the dust off of and display. The idea makes your skin long for open air, and you shake your head hard to dislodge the thoughts that swarm you like droning tropical flies. You will keep going. There has never been an alternative for you.


	3. John

**June 7, 2009 (Year One)**

“Did Jade say how this would work, like with physics?”

You don’t look back at Dave sprite while you finish adjusting the ramp. Moving large objects with precision is not a talent of the Windy Thing, it turns out. You have had to resort to using your hands. “We don’t need her approval for missions of adventure. I’m a god. What’s the worst that can happen?”

“Those’ll make for great last words.”

You wave away his fretting. “Make sure you’re ready with the camera.”

“You got it.” He hefts it onto his shoulder. You’ve dug out your dad’s old video camera, which in the past has been used to record boring stuff like your piano recitals and birthday celebrations. Today, it will capture greater things. 

You walk back to where your bike leans against a tree. The path between it and the ramp has been swept clear of stones, a task that left your nails glistening with oil. This stunt is going to be great. You and Dave sprite agreed that if you now have all sorts of powers like flying and walking through walls, there’s no reason not to exploit them for fun and cinematic excellence.  You have already tried microwaving one of Rose’s old grimoires, with exciting if upsetting results. The bike stunt was his idea, inspired by his silly Tony Hawk game, and you are not about to let him get cold feet now. Since he doesn’t even have feet, he has no excuse. “I already flew my dad’s car once,” you say, kicking up the kick stand. “And you are supposed to have a license to operate a motor vehicle. This is much safer in comparison, when you think about it that way.”

“Didn’t you crash the car?”

“Not for a while. There were extenuating circumstances.”

“Hey, it’ll make a good video either way.” He taps a button. “We’re live. This is John Egbert, and welcome to Jackass.”

“I am about to reenact a classic scene from ET,” you announce for the camera. One of Dave’s brother’s weird puppets has been strapped to the front of the bike to complete the look.  You start pedaling – wobbling slightly, since it’s been a while – and focus on picking up speed.  Your legs burn when you hit the ramp, but you pump the pedals and call the Breeze to your aid.  The bike’s front tire hits in the air, wind pushes it up –

– and you tumble face first into a gulch of black oil. You fall sideways off your bike and splash into the gunk. The bike’s wheels spin.

“Kind of a lame wipeout, but I can add explosions in post production,” Dave sprite says.

You groan. “I don’t know what went wrong. This worked last time.”

He shrugs. “We can try a bigger ramp.”

It’s a tempting suggestion. You are glad to see that he’s finally embracing the spirit of experimentation. The smuppet alien stand-in has begun to sink beneath the oil. You reach for it, and he shakes his head.

“Let it go. Casualty of progress.”

It’s not the only one. Your knees and elbows sting. “Let’s go back to the ship. Maybe there _is_ a physics answer to this.”

Jade clicks her tongue out your oil-covered clothes, but before she can pull out the band-aids, your scrapes glow and close over. “Rapid regen health,” Dave sprite says. “You guys are op.”

You run your fingers over smooth skin. “I wasn’t joking about the god part.”

“Even gods have to obey fundamental natural laws,” Jade informs you. Then she must reflect on the set of impossible powers the two of you have, because she adds, “Sometimes. Did you say last time you tried this was with a car? That has a lot more surface area to generate lift. That might be your problem.”

The two of you consider this. “So if we tried it with a trash can lid…” Dave sprite begins.

You stand up before he can go any further. “I have a sled.”

“Should I be patting you two down before I let you go planetside so you don’t hurt yourselves?” Jade asks, but her ears aren’t back, so you can tell she’s not really annoyed.

“You would be slowing the advance of scientific progress,” you inform her.

“It’s as good a way to learn about basic physics as any other.” She snaps her fingers, and the oil saturating your clothes leaves the fabric to form a shimmering ball floating above her shoulder. “Cleaning you up is probably a waste of time, but good luck. Do you want me to send you back down?”

“Sure, but put us by my house. Are you sure you don’t want to come supervise?”

She smiles and shakes her head. “Someone should keep an eye on things up here.”

That’s what she told you the first time you offered. Jade has been taking this whole trip very seriously. That’s important up to a point, you guess (you had always taken grocery stores for granted) but it can go too far. You need to make room for fun. The more room you make for fun, the less there is for anything else.

“Let’s try this again,” you tell Dave sprite. “I bet I’ll stay in the air for at least sixty seconds this time.”

“A day of dishwashing duty says you won’t,” he says.

You raise the stakes. “A week.”

“Deal.” Before Jade can teleport you away in a flash of green, Dave sprite makes sure to grab the video camera again. “Jackass number two, here we go.”


	4. Davesprite

**July 29, 2009 (Year One)**

You’ve been putting off going home.

Having wings cramps your style in more ways than one. You have to wriggle in chairs to make sure they drape over the back and prefer lying stretched out on the couch. It’s hard to get comfortable while sleeping – you’ve taken to curling up in a mess of sheets and pillows. If you change your shirt, you have to cut holes in the new one. All told, most of the stuff in your apartment isn’t useful to you now. But Jade wants to audit the supplies the three of you have on hand, and if you keep coming up with excuses, it’ll look like you’re afraid of something.

Which you’re not. You’ve dueled Jack Noir (and lost) and stared down meteors (which would have killed you without divine intervention). Your apartment is where you spent thirteen years of your life, and it’s not like you’ll get yelled at for not paying the rent.

Everything is just how the other Dave left it. The toilet still stands where your bed used to be, which comes as a surprise. You’d moved it in your timeline. That was the extent of your housekeeping. LOHAC’s heat was oppressive and Rose needed watching, so you spent most of your nights on her couch. Depending on her state of intoxication, Lalonde sleepovers could involve drawing up escape plans or holding her hair back over the toilet. You don’t miss that, but you do miss your sister. She remembers at least part of what you went through.

Something moves in your peripheral vision and you whip around, retrieving a blade from your sylladex. It’s only a shirt sleeve flapping in the breeze of the fan you’ve switched on. False alarm. You keep the sword out anyway as you walk deeper into the apartment. You never know.

John’s grandmother wanted any food left behind. Even if it’s past its expiration date, she can use the code on the back of its captcha card to make more. You rifle through the cabinets, retrieving some soda cans and chip bags and tripping three different booby traps. A spring loaded puppet with blood bag attachment paints your shoulder with a splash of red. A sparkler singes your hair. The time away from Bro has left you rusty. You work faster, returning to your room and pawing through shirts Dave won’t miss that you can adapt for wings. You want to get out of here.

What would you be afraid of?

When Jade buried the dead littering the session, she’d asked you and John if you wanted to say a few words. John had gone stiff and quiet talking about his dad. You had reached for something to say about your brother and come up empty. He’d died twice from your perspective.  That’s how you’d known where to find him the second time around, not that your presence helped much. You jump at the creak of the overheated metal struts supporting you and take stock. The apartment is trashed: cupboards doors hanging open, clothes draped over your desk, shuriken remnants embedded in the walls. You’ve been tearing through the place in your desperation to get out quick, even though there’s no one here but you and the memory of your guardian.

Nothing to be afraid of.

You’ve never gone for adult guidance. Bro wasn’t the type, and if you’d told any of your teachers the truth they would have blown it out of proportion. You want a baseline, though. Everyone thinks their family is weird.

“Dave? To what do I owe this pleasure?” John’s grandmother asks when you float into the kitchen. She’s cooking; the carapace survivors have a lot of mouths to feed. Those rooks can really eat. “I don’t know why you’d seek out the company of an old woman when there’s so much else to do. Unless you’re hungry?” Her disembodied hand pushes a plate of lasagna under your nose.

“Nah.” You wave it away. At least your prototyping left all of your remaining limbs attached. “I got curious about family history. Wondering if John and Jade are circus freaks by upbringing or if they never stood a chance genetically speaking.”

She chuckles. “They come from an esteemed lineage of the unusual. Not to mention the formidable. But I can’t take all the credit; they’ve turned into wonderful young people on their own.”

The plate has been bumping insistently against your upper arm. She never thinks you’re eating enough. You take it so she’ll stop pushing. “What was it like for you growing up?”

“No Internet, if you can believe it. That makes my rebirth as a gaming abstraction even more of an adventure.” With her free hand, she picks up the tablet John alchemized for her and peers good-naturedly at the buttons. “I lived through quite a bit of history, and now I’m watching you children make more. I can’t complain.”

“Did you...” You take a bite of pasta to act casual. “Were your parents nice?”

Her smile fades. “Oh, that’s a long sad story you don’t want to hear.”

You don’t say anything, only partly to avoid being chastised for talking with your mouth full. Maybe she can tell the amount of effort it took you to ask the question, because she relents.

“I was adopted by a southern gentleman and his baroness wife. It was quite a scandal, two pillars of the community taking in a child of my color. This was at the start of the century,” she adds, seeing your expression. “We didn’t have celebrities making a point of adopting infants from all across the globe. The baron died before I was old enough to remember him, but the baroness… she was a real monster. The stories I could tell would make your hair curl! It drove my brother to run away.”

You nearly choke. “Your brother?”

“Jade’s grandfather. She’s the one who could tell you more about him. After we parted ways I lost track beyond reading about his exploits in the news. I thought about following him many times, but I didn’t.” She shakes her head, but you don’t see signs of regret. That family has always been good at putting the past behind them. “Whether it was out of cowardice or stubbornness, even I’m not sure this many years later.

“The baroness. Were you afraid of her?”

“Oh, terribly! I tiptoed around the manor for fear of setting her off, and even after she left I was petrified if I dropped a spoon. I always worried she’d come back one day.” She clicks her tongue and stirs a boiling pot with her disembodied hand. “As it turns out, I was right.”

That sounds like something you should follow up on later, but for now you ignore it. “Everyone’s a little afraid of their parents, right? Did you ever wonder… If she was hard on you to get you ready for something? If it was all for your own good?”

The stirring stops. She’s devoting all of her attention to your question. “I thought she might come to respect the way I strove to beat her at her own game. Instead, when she left she willed the business to my brother. That showed me!  But I built a life of my own and raised a son I hope never had cause to fear me.” She presses her lips together. It’s the most serious you’ve ever seen her, even with the jester’s hat throwing off the look. “If that’s closest someone can give you to love, sometimes you have to go looking elsewhere. But neither of us deserved the treatment we got.”

Your fork scrapes across the plate with a screech. “Us?”

“My brother and I.”

“Right.” You set the half-eaten lasagna on the countertop. “Sorry you had to go through that. Sounds like it sucked.”

“It’s not a part of my life I look back on fondly, but in the end I don’t regret how things turned out.” She smiles at you in a way that suggests she knows what you’re not telling. “I may not be your game guide or your grandmother, but if you ever need a listening ear, just call.”

That’s not likely to happen. Even this conversation has given you more than you know how to deal with. “Good talk.”

“I enjoyed it.” She picks up her spoon again. “Thank you for passing some time with an old woman. John and Jade are lucky to have such a considerate friend.”

After this many months, you have mostly tamped down the instinct to whip around when one of your friends approaches you from behind. You don’t reach for a weapon when they raise their voices. They haven’t given you any reason to be afraid. In those ways, this battleship is nothing like home. “I’m lucky to have them too,” you say.


	5. Jade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for discussion of past gun violence.

**August 16, 2009 (Year One)**

The sword flies from your hand and clatters to the floor. You stamp your foot. “You’re cheating!”

Davesprite throws his arms out in a gesture of mock innocence, the sword in his hand narrowly missing carving a gash through the wall of the bridge. “Am not. I’ve just got years of experience on you.”

“I’ll catch up,” you say.

“That’s a scientific impossibility.”

“I’m a scientific impossibility,” you snap, and he laughs, because it’s true.

John shakes his head at you from his position propped up against the deck railing. You suggested he come along, but he’s not interested in picking up any additional swordplay training. You guess smashing things with hammers bigger than your head works for him. Instead, he watches and shouts out suggestions. That would be annoying enough if, in the heat of the moment, you didn’t find yourself obeying, and his suggestions are intentionally bad.

“Why did you want to learn, anyway?” Davesprite asks as you hurry to retrieve your weapon.

You think of your grandfather slumped over the table, of Dave’s blood hissing as it melted its way through what was left of the snow. “It looked like fun,” you say brightly.

He raises his eyebrows. “Tell me if it still looks like fun in a few hours when your arms are filing for secession.”

It hasn’t been that long, and your arms already hurt. Plenty of your equipment is heavy, but this is a different range of motion. You’d picked the sword because it looked more interesting than a hammer, but you’re starting to think fondly of the straightforwardness of hitting things really hard. Maybe John is onto something. Also, learning from the best around doesn’t mean you’re learning from anyone good. When you asked Davesprite what techniques he’d studied, he’d looked blank.

“I think the Strider fighting style boils down to hitting shit with other shit, honestly.”

“Does it work?”

He shrugged. You remembered that two of them together couldn’t hold off Jack, whatever fancy fighting moves they may or may not have known, and didn’t ask again.

It’s not all bad. Your arms hurt and you keep losing, which is embarrassing, but keeping track of where everything is situated in space comes easily to you. Motion, direction, speed… whether those factor into a physics equation or your own body, you have them on lockdown. If you close your eyes, you can track how everything moves by feeling it. If your opponent followed any sort of pattern, you could probably fight them blindfolded. But you suppose the Strider fighting style’s grounding in chaos works for them, because you can’t think fast enough for that to make much of a difference. You’ve had your practice blade back in your hand for maybe a minute, and you’re already losing ground.

“John, help me,” you say, backing up.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks. He’s taking pictures of himself making funny faces, and he doesn’t bother looking your way.

“Help your sister out! As a family we should display a strong united front.” You duck without him having to tell you. “I’m losing.”

“Can I clobber him with my hammer?” he asks with more enthusiasm than is warranted.

“No hammers,” Davesprite says before you can answer.

“Then I’m not interested,” John says. You frown at him. While you’re distracted, Davesprite knocks you off balance and sends your sword flying across the deck again. You land hard with a startled “oof”. John takes a picture.

“I think we’re done for the day,” you say from the ground.

John drifts over to look down at you. His face is framed by the green blur that is always rushing past, the only evidence that this journey is taking you anywhere. “If you’re done doing that, you could teach us how to shoot.”

The deck feels cold beneath you. “Why would you want to know that?”

“Why not? It would be more useful than stabbing things; now that we can fly I would rather fight underlings from a distance. Also,” he adds, “I was never very good at water gun fights.”

You sit up and rub the back of your neck. Not too long ago, you would have been thrilled to teach your brother marksmanship. Now, when you look at a rifle, you see Dave’s shirt spreading with dark red stains. His blood had splattered onto your shoulder blades and dried there. Bullets can be turned against you. A blade is under your control. 

(At least, that’s what you think now trading practice blows with Davesprite. In a little over two years, you will point a sword at a different boy with the same face and accuse him of breaking your heart, and it will only be half because you wanted to.)

“Alright,” you say, and fix a smile on your face.

You sit cross-legged on your bedroom floor with a captchalogue card resting in front of you. It holds the hunting rifle you first learned to shoot with, which you’ve given a quick check-up to make sure everything’s in working order. John reaches for it, and you shake your head. “No touching until we’ve gone over basic safety rules.”

“Really?” John withdraws his hand and props his cheek on it. “Ok, what are they?”

You tick them off on your fingers. “One. Treat all guns as if they're loaded, even if someone tells you that they aren’t. Two, if the gun isn’t loaded, don’t load it unless you’re planning on using it. Three, if it _is_ loaded, don’t point the gun at anything you’re not intending to shoot, and keep your finger off the trigger until you’ve found your target. Be sure of that target. Things move. Four, never leave a gun unattended. Secure them when you’re not using them. You can lock them up or keep them safe in your sylladex if you want easy access.”

“It’s just us on this ship, though,” Davesprite says. He’s chosen not to participate in this lesson, instead fiddling with the settings on your wardrobifier. The symbol on the front of your shirt keeps flashing: dog’s head, horseshoe, heart.

“Us, a bunch of carapaces who don’t have firearms experience, and consorts who get into everything.” You’d tossed away the weapon that pushy troll with the W’s talked you into alchemizing, and an iguana made off with it. Hopefully you’re not responsible for a rise in amphibian crime rates. In the past, you’ve been lax with the rules you’re drilling John on now. That was a mistake. If you’d sighted your target, if you’d stopped to _think_ – “You don’t want to be responsible for someone getting hurt.”

Davesprite taps a button on the wardrobifier. Your shirt changes to a stylized sun. “I get it, everyone’s got their hazing rituals. Bro lectured me on ‘respecting the blade’ and then made me hold poses for hours. How long does he have to pay his dues with the boring stuff?”

“Yeah,” John chimes in. “If you don’t want to teach me, you can just say so.”

You slam your fists into the floor so hard they and the card all jump. “This is not ‘boring stuff’.” You’d been a child playing with the noisy toys you liked to watch your grandfather use, and you’d pointed one right at your head. It could have killed you. “If my grandfather had followed these rules, he wouldn’t have died.”

You’re angry at him, you realize. You pulled the trigger, so in the end his death is your responsibility, but why had he let you get that far? Who leaves loaded guns within reach of clumsy child’s hands? John is sitting in front of you with a face that looks more like your grandfather’s every year asking if he can breeze past the filler, and you wonder if that’s why he did it too. Was your safety the boring stuff? Were you?

Your breathing has gone uneven, and you fight to steady it. There’s no point getting upset over things you can’t change. It only upsets other people. John has edged as far away from you as possible without standing up to move. Davesprite holds up his hands slowly like you would when approaching a frightened animal. “How long ago did he die?”

“I was six,” you tell the floor.

You don’t know a lot about what counts as normal on the mainland. So much of media misrepresented things. From their silence, though, you guess this doesn’t meet the criteria. John reaches out and pushes the captchalogue card back toward you. “…I could teach you guys how to program.”

“Aren’t you shit at it?” Davesprite says.

“Can _you_ make a for loop that doesn’t crash your weird computer brain?”

“You got me. What do you say,” he asks you, “want to make the less delicious version of carrot cake?”

They’ve jumped to this new subject without even a glance in the rearview mirror, and you are grateful. That way, you can all pretend this conversation never happened. With luck, no one will ask you to touch a gun again. For now, you slot the card back into your sylladex. Rule four: secure all firearms. No one else will die because of you. “That sounds like fun,” you say, and John pulls you to your feet.


	6. John

**September 3, 2009**

The calendar your nanna hung up in the kitchen reminds you of what month it is. “Huh,” you say, spraying Poptart crumbs across the table. (Strawberry Splash Gushers TM flavor, thanks to creative alchemy.) “I would’ve started school by now.”

“Freshman year,” Dave sprite says, and takes a gulp of coffee. “Good thing the world ended.”

“I always thought it would be fun to go to school,” Jade says. She’s drinking a mug of herbal tea with the bag still in it. That’s only one of her many strange dining habits, but at least as far as you know she doesn’t eat the bags afterward.

“Why bother?” he says. “I’m pretty sure you’re the smartest one on this boat.”

“Yeah,” you agree, “you’re way past what we were covering on standardized tests.”

“Standardized tests?”

“Oh, every year the school made a big deal about us taking tests that compared us to people all over the state, or even the world. They gave us bribes and everything, since I think their jobs were on the line.” Your teachers had always made it sound like the sky would fall down if you didn’t take assessment season as seriously as they did. You guess they were right about the sky falling, but you don’t think the apocalypse was because of your failure to pay attention to the rules and regulations of the Smarter Balanced tests.

“So everyone has to learn the exact same thing at the same pace, all over the country?” Jade asks, making the fatal mistake of attempting to apply logic to standardized testing. “That doesn’t sound like a good way to teach people anything.”

“Welcome to American public ed,” Dave sprite says.

“But see, I didn’t even know about that! That’s why I wish I’d gone myself, so I’d know what all of you were talking about. All I know comes from TV and movies, and I suspect people do not actually burst into song like in _High School Musical_.” Jade raises her eyebrows over the rim of her mug, clearly waiting for confirmation.

“They don’t in middle school,” you say. “In high school I cannot confirm or deny.”

Dave sprite attempts to stealthily add another spoonful of sugar to his coffee. There is probably more sugar in there than in your Poptarts at this point. “We were going to get our stage directions during orientation.”

 “Weren’t you the cooolest guy in the school?” Jade asks with the cheerful sarcasm of someone who has definitely witnessed the sugar transaction, as well as all the other very _un_ cool things Dave sprite has been up to over the past few months. “I seem to recall you telling me something like that many times before.”

“I was underappreciated in my time.” Dave sprite takes another gulp, makes a face, and rasps, “Like how Kodak thought digital photography was gonna be a fad.”

All the scholastic exploits you shared are true, if anyone bothers to fact check the details. Any story can sound funny if you tell it right, which was good news for you, because with the exception of a few good pranks, you’d been an observer for all of them. That was typical. You’d been a middle of the road kind of student: friendly but with no best friends, teased but not bullied, not flunking but not the teacher’s pet. It’s difficult for you to picture anyone’s face without pulling out your eighth grade yearbook. The end pages are filled with HAGS, the classic message for when you have nothing more personal to write. There’s no one you could say you miss. That’s probably for the best since they’re… since you can’t talk to them now.

You’re not sure you want to talk about school anymore.

Jade, however, is persistent. “What did you learn in history class? Everything in my grandfather’s library was at least a decade old, I’m really behind.”

“But you had an Internet connection,” you say.

“I did, but I didn’t work out how to get online until after I’d read some of his books and learned all the wrong things. The bad information is always what sticks in your head.” She clicks her tongue, like anyone will care if she has memorized a slightly outdated version of the periodic table.

“I can’t help you, we always made it to around the Industrial Revolution every year and then ran out of time.” One year you got past World War I. The sheer novelty had made the Great Depression interesting. “I don’t think school was as exciting as you imagined. It was pretty boring most of the time. Your way of learning things sounds a lot better, even if some of it was too old. Why are you so interested, anyway?”

Jade’s ears flick back. She takes another sip of tea. “You can make friends at school. I always liked that part.”

You guess that’s true, theoretically. In books and on TV, kids make some of their best friends for life at school. They even marry their classmates sometimes, which added a lot of pressure when deciding who to partner with on group projects. In real life, you rarely hung out with anyone from school after the last bell rang. You went home to your separate lives and stayed there. Some of you scribbled phone numbers in each other’s yearbooks, but you’d known as you’d done it that you’d never call. Maybe other people did things differently, but you?

“I didn’t have any friends at school,” Dave sprite says. “Just online.” His cheeks glow faintly yellow, and he adds, “Hell, I found my sister online. How often do you think those Parent Trap level shenanigans played out without the great leveler that is AOL messenger? The Lindsay Lohans would’ve sorted that shit out if they’d had MySpace accounts.”

“So you see,” you tell Jade, “you didn’t miss out on anything. At least compared to us.”

She swirls her tea bag around and around the rim of her mug. You wonder if you haven’t convinced her. “I guess not.”

“If you really want, we can make you take the ACT,” Dave sprite says.

She stops stirring. “What’s the ACT?”

He snorts. Although you were still a few years away from the PSAT, college prep tests were already being spoken of with dread. “Do you want to tell her?”

You shove the rest of the Poptart into your mouth, swallow with effort, and steeple your fingers together. “Ok, I can try to teach what I remember about the ancient and mysterious rites and rituals of public education. That way you can sort of get your wish granted. The John Egbert School about School is now in session.”

“I’m ditching,” Dave sprite says, but Jade leans toward you across the table. Her attention takes the edge off your discomfort. If you choose your subjects carefully, going back to school for an hour or two won’t be so bad. Any story can be a happy one. It’s a matter of how you tell it.


	7. Davesprite

**October 19, 2009**

You glare at the egg. The egg wobbles back.

John’s grandmother decided it would be a great idea for all of you to take turns preparing group meals. She claims it’ll teach you valuable life skills; you think she’s sick of catering to three wildly different tastes. So far, results have been mixed. John has done all right for himself by relying on Hamburger Helper’s boxed offerings. Jade knows how to feed herself, but the rest of you aren’t as into salads. You’re the undisputed third place finalist. Your extreme Doritos flavor ramen last week was not well received.

Tonight you’re trying omelets. That should be easy enough, with the added bonus of egg-based humor that might deflect from whatever goes wrong. You’re not sure how many eggs to use, though. One? One for each of you?

You crack three more and dump them into the pan. Four’s a good even number.

Rose is the missing member who fills out your quartet, but she wouldn’t be much help in this scenario. Rose’s mom hadn’t been much of a cook, so she’d stocked the freezer with Weight Watchers and Marie Callender’s. During your doomed timeline, the two of you survived on microwave dinners when your sister didn’t prefer a liquid diet. You’d strifed a few times over cosmic brownies.

If Rose were here, she’d lay out an intricately woven tablecloth, light candles set in ornate candlesticks, and then slap Lunchables packages in front of everyone. Her delivery would get a laugh, the juxtaposition of class and dollar store chic maybe even achieving the status of art. If you tried the same thing it would look pathetic, like you couldn’t be assed to make an effort.

You wonder what she’s eating right now.

The eggs are starting to turn opaque on the bottoms. Maybe you should have mixed them up first. You prod them with a spatula to break the yolks and send yellow goo spreading across the pan. It looks gross, but it’s nothing some melted cheese can’t cover up. When does that go in again?

You toss in the shredded cheese, along with some chopped bacon and what Jade called green onions even though they don’t look much like onions to you. They’re mostly in there so the idea of vegetables is represented. Then you slide the spatula under the whole thing and flip it over.

Whoops. Omlettes are retro anyway. You’ll do scrambled eggs.

To their credit, John and Jade are doing a good job of not looking apprehensive when you bring the skillet to the table. John hasn’t laid his EpiPen conspicuously nearby or anything. “Scrambled eggs,” you declare, waving the spatula with a flourish. A yellow gob flies off the end to splatter in parts unknown. “Help yourselves.”

Lacking an alternative, they do. Your waiting for their verdict must look suspicious, but you’re too anxious to eat. Besides, you thought the Doritos ramen tasted fine.

John swallows. “Actually, that’s not bad.”

You relax and take a bite. He’s right. It wouldn’t get four Michelin stars, but it’s edible, and it’s the closest to real food you’ve ever made. “Fuck, that’s a relief. Grandmama was beginning to worry she’d never find me a suitable husband if I couldn’t provide three square meals per day.”

“Now, now,” says John’s grandmother, who has drifted in to hear the results. “Even in my day, I didn’t master culinary skills to get a man.” She winks at you. “I did it to get even.”

Jade makes a face and reaches into her mouth to extricate a piece of shell. But then she leans forward for another scoop of eggs, so overall you’ll count this as a win. No one took seconds of the ramen. You wonder if Rose has made it past frozen dinners on her meteor a universe away. Is your alpha self eating better? Given the trolls’ repeated references to grub-based food products, you doubt it.

You like where you are just fine.


	8. Jade

**November 21, 2009**

 

The buzz of your phone wakes you, and your breath puffs out in a cloud of white. It startles you at first; you’ve only seen that happen once before.

\--  turntechGodhead [TG]  started pestering  gardenGnostic [GG] \--

TG: jade  
TG: there are salamanders in my bed  
GG: the powers out! congratulations, you are currently the hottest thing on the ship  
TG: i knew youd notice eventually  
GG: :PP very funny  
GG: theyre naturally drawn to your body heat because they cant generate their own thats all  
GG: you could ask them to leave  
TG: they dont listen to non players  
TG: im lower on the pecking order than some goddamn reptiles can you believe it  
GG: amphibians  
TG: whatever  
TG: the point is send help  
TG: you can classify them while youre getting them off me  
GG: wow i would think a self proclaimed “master of the blade”   
TG: oh christ youre not gonna start this shit again are you  
GG: unvanquished champion of twenty matches and running  
TG: i dont have to lie here and take this i have rights  
GG: would be able to defend his person from a few friendly consorts :o  
TG: john would have mercy on me  
GG: by all means appeal to the lord of the salamanders  
GG: maybe he can get his unruly subjects in line   


Thanks to the hearing you inherited from Bec, you hear Davesprite shout, “Hey John, your bed sheets cult is all up in my personal space.”

A door opens. Footsteps cross the hallway. “I’ll get rid of them,” John says. “Look out!”

“Wait, no st—” You listen harder and hear a yelp, a thud, and the damp sounds of several salamanders hitting the ground and making themselves scarce. Your phone buzzes again.

TG: jade theres an idiot in my bed  
GG: so everythings back to normal?  
TG: im hurt  
GG: lol  
TG: no i think your brother broke my spine   


You stick a toe out from under the covers, hastily withdraw it, and stand up dragging your blanket with you. Salamanders wrapped in their own sheets waddle past as you make your way to Davesprite’s room. He lies in a pose of furious resignation, staring at the ceiling. John lies spread-eagled across him. It appears he executed a bellyflop maneuver. “Did they leave?” he asks.

One salamander remains huddled near the edge of the tangle of sheets, but it is not hurting anyone, so you will not betray its trust. “Your mission is accomplished.”

“Get… him… off… me,” Davesprite groans. 

“There is only one solution to this problem,” you say gravely. Then you judge your angle of attack and plop down on John’s back. He grunts. Beneath both of you, the last of Davesprite’s air escapes in a squeak. “This is cozy,” you say.

The final salamander crawls onto your lap and looks up at you with wet, soulful eyes. Then it blows a spit bubble that pops all over your face, leaving behind a thin coating of slime.

“Just…ice,” Davesprite wheezes.

“What, what happened?” asks John, who is stuck facing the floor.

You wipe the spit off with a shirt sleeve and then lift the salamander onto the floor. It’s shivering, which is pathetic enough to move you to stand up. “I guess I should take a look at the boilers.”

Once John’s free, he rolls off to one side. “Oh hey, it’s kind of cold over here. You _are_ warm.”

Davesprite massages his ribs. “ _I_ feel fine.”

You reach out toward the boiler room with your Space sense to try to diagnose the problem. “I don’t think these systems were meant to run for this long. Once I get things back online, it’ll take a while for everything to warm up. Until then, we’ll just have to be chilly.”

“Unless you’re the hottest guy around,” Davesprite says.

“That is true,” you muse. “You know what that means. We will have to reform the pile.”

He rolls over and pulls a pillow over his head. “I take it back. John’s the hot one.”

“Oh, come on,” you say, while John tries to decide whether to be flattered by his new title or offended by his means of acquiring it. “Before the game, we said it would be fun to have a sleep over.”

“On one condition,” says the voice emerging from beneath the pillow. “I am _not_ buried under everyone this time.”

“All done,” you say forty-five minutes later. “We should warm up in a few hours. Until then, please thank our friend for donating his unusually high temperature for the cause.”

“You’re doing my chores for a week for this,” says your press-ganged body heat donor.

“We can discuss terms and conditions later,” you say. “Now scoot over.”

“Wait a second,” says John, who now resembles one of his consorts with a spare set of sheets pulled around him like a robe. “Where did that one salamander go?”

You feel small claws grasp delicately at your hair. Weight settles on the top of your head. “All present and accounted for.”

John shakes his head and lies down. “As long as no one asks me to paint its nails.”


	9. John

**December 1, 2009 (Year One)**

Jade has never had a birthday party. You learn this while discussing how to celebrate Halloween. “I’ve never been to a party,” she says, unaware of your growing horror. “Or if I have, I don’t remember it. I was really young, and my grandpa traveled a lot.”

You and Dave sprite lock eyes, and without speaking a word you are both on board with Operation: Give Jade a Real Birthday.

“Cake is traditional, even if I’m not a fan,” you muse, tapping the tip of a pencil against your chin. Dave sprite has added several items to your list in glowing letters with a flick of his fingers. “Nanna will be happy to help with that, there will be no restraining her.”

“We could go savory,” he suggests. “Stick some candles on a haunch of raw meat like they give wild animals at the zoo. Think that would appeal to her or give her a moral crisis? PETA principles versus the call of the wild.”

“Very funny. I don’t think being mixed with a dog changes you that much, it’s not like you eat worms now.”

“You don’t know that.”

You roll your eyes and write ‘cake’ down on the list. “Are we missing anything? What did you do for your birthdays?”

He shrugs, doodling on the table in glowing scribbles. “Bro treated them like rites of passage most of the time. Had to run some new chamber of horrors to prove my worth and dig into a heaping plate full of puppet sausage for dessert. He did give me throwing stars once, that was sick. He threw them _at_ me, but they had my name on them.”

You decide not to write this down. “Are you expecting death traps for your birthday this year?” 

“I’m good.”

That does transition into the matter of presents. You can’t go shopping on the yellow yard, but alchemy leaves your imagination as the only limit. “I got her a shirt and some seeds last year. Then she got me a weaponized robot bunny. I might need to try harder.”

The stakes seem higher now that she’s your sister. Well, she’s always been your sister, but you didn’t know that before. She’d been a friend, a good one, but this is something else entirely. “I’ve never had a sister before,” you told her a few days after you found out. “Sorry if I’m doing it wrong.”

“You’re doing fine.” She reached out and squeezed your shoulder. Both she and Dave sprite had been weird about personal space at first, but she was learning. “Nothing has to change, really. I’m just happy you know now.”

“You knew already?” Were you the last to know _everything_?

“Psychic, remember?” She stuck her tongue out. Your skepticism sounded stupid in hindsight. “We looked so similar, I liked to imagine. It was nice to daydream that I had a family, and the older you got the more you looked like my grandpa. The lab only confirmed it.”

You had never daydreamed of having a sibling. Being an only child suited you fine. The image of Jade watching your sleeping form with longing while you snored away, indifferent, made guilt churn in your stomach. You will make up for it now, you have decided, by being the best brother possible. You will live up to everything she dreamed you would be, and that means throwing her the perfect party.

You and Dave sprite meet in secret through November getting everything ready. If you’re getting used to Jade as a sister, he’s also a surprise. You thought you knew Dave, but this one is often sullen or snappy. He’s slower with comebacks, and when they do come they have sharper edges. He doesn’t laugh as much. Dave told you that you couldn’t hurt his feelings because they were the same person, but you are starting to think that he was wrong. They aren’t alike at all, and those differences go a lot further than color scheme or feathers.

You catch him looking at you funny a lot, and when you snap “What?” he always says “Nothing” and looks away. But you know what he’s thinking. It’s obvious. He wouldn’t be here without stupid John Egbert who listened to a troll and got himself killed. It’s your fault he and Rose were doomed. You’re just waiting for the day he says it out loud.

Still, the two of you have a mission in common, and that takes precedence over everything else. In the end, you decide a group present will be easiest. It lowers the pressure of having to create an extra special sibling gift, and Dave sprite was having trouble with ideas too. During the game, you accidentally wrecked Jade’s greenhouse, and she hasn’t gotten around to cleaning it up. The two of you take turns coming up with excuses to visit LOFAF, and you power up your server client to patch holes in the walls and windows. Dave sprite works by hand cleaning off tables and checking to see if any plants survived the sudden winter weather. You also alchemize a bone-shaped chew toy in the name of what he calls irony, which you interpret as a way to undermine everything else’s sincerity if it gets too cheesy. You’re not a great artist and Dave sprite draws badly on purpose, but through trial and error you design a card. Some yards of caution tape and a fistful of gel pens become the ingredients for festive streamers, although both the || and && outputs still say CAUTION in bold letters. It’s the best you can do.

Jade plays along with you blindfolding her, even if considering her space powers it probably doesn’t do anything. When you remove the cloth with a flourish, she claps her hands together. “You did this for me?”

“I fixed the windows,” you say, to make sure she notices.

“This was so nice of you.” Personal space forgotten, she hugs you. She’s warm, maybe because she’s part sprite now or possibly because she’s radioactive. Since you’re God Tier that shouldn’t matter, so you try not to think about it. “I can’t wait to start gardening again. It’s so relaxing, and we won’t have to go through so much grist for meals.”

Dave sprite makes a face behind her back. Neither of you share Jade’s zest for vegetables. “Speaking of food…” you say. No party would be complete without it. Nanna baked the inevitable cake, but she also got into the gardening theme and made dirt and worms: a pudding plus cookie crumb plus gummy worms concoction that was enough to excite kids into a riot in your elementary school classroom. Dave sprite lets a gummy worm dangle halfway out of his mouth and waggles his eyebrows at you before the two of you break into laughter. At that moment, he feels like your friend, like despite timelines and prototyping nothing crucial has changed between you.

It’s one of the last times you’ll feel that way.


	10. Davesprite

**January 11, 2010 (Year One)**

TG: earth to john  
TG: or lohac to john if thats the name of this piece of shit planet im on now  
TG: jades being nice about it but the updates on the imminent destruction of the western hemisphere are starting to get a little passive aggressive  
TG: do you think shes capable of that or is she just trying to be helpful  
TG: dude you picked a hell of a time to lose your phone  
TG: or is it buried under a pile of useless bs in your sylladex  
TG: told you stack modus is for chumps  
TG: call me back  
TG: or call anyone but hurry the fuck up about it  


TT: Anything?  
TG: no  
TG: you  
TT: I wouldn’t be asking otherwise.  
TG: i dunno you might  
TG: just to be nosy  
TG: prying into all my friendtimes desperate to dissect it for signs of homoeroticism like a grad student running out of thesis ideas  
TT: Which there were, apparently, none of.  
TT: Friend times, that is. Homoeroticism rides eternal.  
TG: thats right i got nothing  
TG: what do we do now  


TT: We’re having some trouble getting in touch with John.  
TT: No doubt he’s been distracted ministering to the needs of some local amphibians.  
GG: no doubt! i wouldnt want to get in the way of such a noble task  
TT: In the meantime, we’re looking into alternative solutions. What does your cruxtruder say?  
GG: ummmmm…. 3:14  
TT: Right.  
TT: Dave’s working on something and it should do the trick, so for now stay on the line with me, alright? And keep away from the windows.  
GG: will do!  
TT: Time?  
GG: 2:03  
TT: Ok.  
TT: He just got back to me.  
TT: We should be able to facilitate your Entry any minute now. You’ll be fine.  
GG: you dont have to lie to me rose  
TT: I have to lie to someone.  


TG: rose  
TG: i lost her connection is she  
TG: are we  
TG: rose  
TG: god fucking dammit rose answer me i cant be the only one left i just cant  


You sit up and hug your chest until your breathing slows. Telling yourself it was just a dream won’t help, not when all of it happened.

The creaks and groans of the hull make you twitchy. You told yourself you were going to break the habit, but without thinking you’ve left your room and begun drifting down the hallway. All three of you have caught some kind of bug: maybe something that jumped over from a carapace or maybe something that’s been incubating for months. John and Jade’s eyes are red. Your outline glitches into jagged pixels when you sneeze. It’s nothing serious, and gods don’t die of dysentery ten months down the Oregon Trail’s fourth wall expansion pack, but it makes you nervous anyway. People can die so fucking fast. You’d scraped through a few rooftop duels and thought you were immortal. You know better now.

John’s door hangs open. You squeeze through and look down at him. He’s spread out on his stomach and angled diagonally across the bed, one arm and an ankle dangling over the edge. His mouth hangs open. At least someone on the ship sleeps soundly. Independent observers would think he was the narcoleptic.

Jade’s door is shut. You don’t think it has a lock, but the hinges might creak. Instead you navigate to Settings -> Opacity and lower it to 25% before slipping through the metal. Your skin feels fizzy as the atoms slide by each other.

You have to access the menu again to resolidify, so it takes a moment to look around. Jade sits up in bed, sheets pooled around her waist. Her eyes glint in the faint glow you forgot to turn off. You yelp and jerk backward, banging your recently re-corporeal head on the door.

“What are you doing in here?” She doesn’t sound mad. She sounds fuzzy, like she just woke up. You could have sworn you hadn’t made any noise.

“Uh…” You fumble for an excuse. “Rats. I thought I heard rats, in the walls, and you know those big city rats chomp off people’s toes like they’re a tourist at a tapas bar nibbling mini weenies on toothpicks. So I decided I’d track them down, and this isn’t gonna work with the whole semnipotent demidog thing, is it?”

She covers a yawn with the back of her hand. “That does make it harder to come up with a convincing lie.”

You sigh. “I was checking to see if you were still alive. I do it with John too, and Rose in the other timeline, so it’s not because I think you can’t take care of yourself or anything. Believe me, I know who the weak link is around here. But after a year stuck on a game over screen, I need to make sure.”

She’s quiet. You wonder if she’s going to teleport you back into your room, or a few feet over the bubbling lava of the Forge if you’ve overstepped. She could do it. Then she hugs her knees, face unreadable in the dark. “I dream I’m dead too sometimes.”


	11. Jade

**January 11, 2010 (Year One)**

It’s a dream you must have had before, because it has the solidity of a memory. You’re pushing your way through heavy velvet curtains that are so deeply green they are nearly black.  They block out all light, and you can’t tell whether you’re moving forward or burrowing back.  Your yellow gown whispers along the ground, gathering dust.

When you break through, you do not emerge to a crowd or even the bustle of backstage.  You are in a vast space studded with stars. A figure draped in black robes stands with her back to you. She holds a palette in one hand, and with the other she is painting: painting onto more of those curtains or directly onto the air, swirling colorful scenes that move when you look at them. Scenes of you and your friends. There you are leaning out of your tower on Prospit. John floats surrounded by fireflies. Rose holds her violin to her chin, face peaceful.

“What is my name, dreamer?” the painter asks, drawing your attention away from the art. Her voice is hollow.

In your dream, you guess. You try your friends’ names, ones you remember from books, famous scientists like Marie and Rosalind. There’s a sense of urgency, like knowing who this person is is important, maybe the most important thing you’ve ever done, but somehow you’ve forgotten. Maybe you never knew. The painter turns toward you. Her face is a skull, and her eyes are dark pools. “Not yet,” she says.

When you wake up from the dream, you don’t remember any of it.

You’re used to starting awake in the middle of the night, but it’s always disorienting; you haven’t gotten used to waking up on a ship hurtling through space. Being sick doesn’t help. It’s your first time catching what must be the common cold (nothing about it is common to you) and your head feels too light and too heavy at the same time. Your throat stings when you swallow. Why doesn’t god tier burn the sickness away like it erases your cuts and bruises? Maybe Skaia thinks this suffering builds character. Usually, you roll over and try to ease yourself back into sleep. Tonight, though, there’s someone nearby. You reach out with still groggy Space senses, stomach tight, ready to rend and tear the intruder if necessary. Then you feel the softness of feathers and relax. When he slips through your door (it’s not locked, he could have used the knob) you’re sitting up.

As soon as he sees you, he bangs his head and start sputtering excuses. It’s out of a desire to reassure rather than reveal that you share about your dreams. It’s a private fear, as strong as it is irrational, like pinching yourself when something good happens. A neurosis born from wondering if you were so tired of being dead that you dreamed up a change of scenery. The bubbles could do that, couldn’t they? Sometimes you look sidelong at mirrors, like if you’re quick enough you’ll catch a ghost girl with blank white eyes looking back.

“I think it’s left over from being Jadesprite,” you say. She’d been dead for a long time, if you base it on how long her body stayed around. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. The first law of motion discourages zombies.

You hear a hiss of indrawn breath. You doubt he knows you can hear him, but Bec left you excellent ears. “You remember being her?”

“Bits and pieces.” You regret mentioning it now. “I remember you.” She’d been so excited to see one of her friends in person. “You said something about your Choice.”

He’s not wearing his shades, and in the light of his spectral glow you see his eyes slide to one side. “Nothing important.”

You let the lie pass unchallenged, busy probing for safe recollections. “The sky was falling.” That part is clear: a hail of meteors pounding the surface of the planet, your revered circle of blue disappearing under a blanket of fire. And then, flight.

You can sense more memories lurking not far off. You could retrieve the details if you tried, but that would mean digging into a big knot of fear and sorrow you’d rather keep at arm’s length. The ghost of your dream hovers in the darkness of your room, even if you don’t remember its shape. Did it come from her?

The silence between you stretches. He reaches up to rub the back of his neck, extending and refolding a wing. “Well, you’re alive, so that checks out. I’ll print you off one of those inspection posters to hang up tomorrow. Big red A for ‘not dead yet’.”

“Glad to hear it,” you say. After a lifetime of sleepwalking, it’s good to get confirmation on these things.

His hand hovers above the doorknob. Apparently he uses traditional methods to exit rooms, at least. That is one half of a set of manners. “Could you not tell John about this?”

Having grown up around other people, John would probably take more offense to nighttime prowlers. You pull an imaginary zipper across your lips. “He won’t hear about it from me.”

He nods, tail curling at the end. You’re not used to reading anyone’s body language yet, whether their body is fully human or not, but you think it’s from anxiety, or maybe embarrassment. “I can knock it off if it bugs you. I know it’s stupid, you’re not gonna just vanish.”

You know your eyes aren’t blank, but you’d be driven frantic without a mirror to make sure. Who are you to deny someone something that helps? Besides, the nights can be long and lonely, especially when you have bad dreams.

“Next time,” you say, “go ahead and knock.”


	12. John

**January 13, 2009 (Year One)**

\-- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG] \--  
  
EB: hi, karkat!  
EB: i am waiting to give you time to come up with a suitably scathing response. i know you like to brag about how you “totally own” me in our conversations, or what ever.  
EB: anything?  
EB: oh well. jade said you wouldn’t be able to contact us, and i didn’t get responses earlier, but i thought i should check in case you had come up with some clever invention.  
EB: you have that genius hacker troll, right?  
EB: unless he was one of the people who got murdered when all the murders were happening, in which case i am sorry for your loss.  
EB: damn it, that sounded insensitive, didn’t it? maybe it is for the best you will not read these for two more years.  
EB: or two years and three months, to be exact. dave sprite is very good at giving exact times for things.  
EB: mostly i wanted to check in to see how dave and rose are doing.  
EB: there is no use trying to get a straight answer out of them, i am sure you know that by now.  
EB: they are too interested in sounding smart and funny to impress the esteemed pesterchum message literary critics, who definitely exist.  
EB: be nice to them, ok? i do believe you are capable of being nice when you make an effort.  
EB: or maybe i should order you to be mean to them so you’ll be nice to spite me.  
EB: it doesn’t matter really, since you’re not getting any of these.  
EB: will they all get there in three years?  
EB: if so, sorry for the spam, future karkat! you can yell at me in person.  
EB: i will look forward to it.  
  
\-- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] \--

EB: hi, rose! hope you’re doing ok.  
EB: i know these messages aren’t going through, but i’m going to keep writing them if that’s ok with you.  
EB: maybe you’re watching me write them right now through your crystal ball, you are a seer after all.  
EB: i’m scooting over so that if you are, you can look over my shoulder.  
EB: hopefully living with the aliens is not too overwhelming. if i had to pick anyone to go through an extended first contact scenario, it would be you.  
EB: (don’t tell dave i said that, i’m sure he is doing fine.)  
EB: you will be a worthy ambassador for our culture and won’t let anyone put you on a dissection table or other scary things aliens do in movies.  
EB: as a pranking master though I would recommend making up at least a few ridiculous lies about our species. it is only fair.  
EB: while i’m talking to you, even if it is just a one way imaginary conversation, do you remember talking in that castle on the battlefield?  
EB: at least i was talking, you kept babbling in eldritch horror speak but i assumed you were doing your part to carry on the conversation.  
EB: you may remember me mentioning that karkat said we were supposed to get married.  
EB: maybe he brought it up to you now that you cannot escape him.  
EB: or maybe you forgot all about that and me bringing it up is making things awkward.  
EB: since i couldn’t understand you i don’t know what your opinion was on the whole thing.  
EB: and here i am again talking about it when you can’t answer. kind of stupid of me, haha.  
EB: anyway, it was a very stressful time, and you probably shouldn’t read too much into it if you don’t want to.  
EB: that’s all i wanted to say. we can talk about it in person when we see each other again.  
EB: have a good trip.  
  
\-- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] –-

EB: i’m starting to feel pretty dumb about writing these, but i guess you never know.  
EB: whatever lame sciencey barrier that is blocking us from talking to each other might fall down at any time and then these would only arrive a little bit late.  
EB: i hope you and the trolls haven’t killed each other yet.  
EB: is terezi still hitting on you, if it is true what karkat was accusing her of? how do you feel about that?  
EB: honestly, i am kind of relieved i didn’t meet vriska right after everything happened so i would have to deal with that... although three years is longer than i needed to think about it.  
EB: tell her i said hi, ok?   
EB: or i guess i can just send her another equally pointless message. forget i said anything.  
EB: things here are fine.  
EB: you might be surprised how dave sprite is acting, though. sometimes he doesn’t seem much like you at all.  
EB: i don’t know if it is being a sprite or the doomed time line...  
EB: maybe it is due to being a bird. he’s broody, heh.  
EB: he and jade have been talking a lot. i would ask your opinion on that if i could.  
EB: i guess i am writing this because i don’t have my own dave to gossip in dark corners with.   
EB: that makes me sound kind of pathetic.  
EB: like I said, things are fine.  
EB: we all passed around a cold and i’m supposed to be recovering, but i feel a lot better.  
EB: have you swapped any gross alien diseases? that is a common sci fi plot point.  
EB: i will talk to you when i see you, i guess.  
EB: in the mean time, remember no matter how flirtatious the aliens become, we were your best friends first.  
  
\-- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering arachnidsGrip [AG] \--

EB: you would probably consider this a laaaaaaaame thing to do, so i won’t write very much.  
EB: but the last time we talked a lot was happening, and then i didn’t hear from you again before we got stuck on this stupid three year separation trip.  
EB: karkat was really weird about it when i tried to contact you.   
EB: but then he did state he disapproved of troll/human fraternization so that was probably why.  
EB: i already messaged him, i wonder if that would make him more or less cranky about this.  
EB: now HE is guilty of fraternizing. he will have to arrest himself.  
EB: speaking of all that.  
EB: you mentioned in your last message something about a date.   
EB: or d8, heh.  
EB: in my opinion, that is moving a little fast for people who just met.  
EB: well, i guess you were hassling me for years from my perspective and you could look at my entire life, which is sort of creepy, but still.  
EB: however i do think it would be fun to do something together when we meet up.   
EB: if you’re still interested, anyway.  
EB: so mark me down for april 13, 2012?  
EB: it will be my birthday, but you don’t have to get me anything.  



	13. Davesprite

**February 6, 2010 (Year One)**

“Are you sure Rose won’t mind?” Jade asks.

You look up at the blocky outline of Rose’s house. Iridescent water tumbles down to spray your faces with mist. “She let me crash here all the time. John literally crashed here, and I don’t think she put any ancient curses on him.”

John makes a show of patting himself down. “Nope, no curses detected!”

“Unless it’s something slow acting,” you add. “Death will come on swift wings to all who disturb chez Lalonde, after death takes a few months off to find itself. Maybe stops for a drink, pulls over to get a selfie at one of those roadside attractions with the man-sized rubber band balls.”

He rolls his eyes. “If Rose didn’t curse me when she was gray and speaking in tongues, I think I will be fine now. It’s not like we are plundering an ancient tomb. We’re just visiting our very good friend’s house, which we would have done if she was here. She would want to know she was extending the highest possible hospitality to her guests.”

“Convinced yet?” you ask Jade.

“You all make a very compelling case.”

You pull open the door (with effort; sand and chalk dust have piled up in the frame) and sweep your arm forward. “After you.”

Even though you gave Jade a hard time about it, visiting Rose’s house is weird for you too. You’ve swum on the beach a few times and dropped in to scrounge for household items no one else had, but mostly you’ve avoided it. It’s too easy to get dragged back to the last time you spent more than a few hours here: Rose pacing with threads of darkness trailing off her, you bending over notes spread out on the coffee table, the overwhelming _emptiness_ that comes from being the only two humans left driving you both toward the brink. You force those thoughts away. John gave you a whirlwind tour of his house and what’s left of his yard (cautioning you to avoid the treacherous pogo ride). You showed them around your apartment and cracked some jokes about Bro’s home furnishing choices, although even you thought they fell flat. After talking with John’s grandmother, it’s hard to look at any of it in the same way. Rose’s house was up. Fair’s fair. The visits may have been mixed as far as entertainment value goes, but it’s something to do.

“I call this guy Executus the Constipated,” you say, high fiving a wizard statue with his hand raised in a spell casting gesture and a strained expression on his face. “You know, from Rose’s wizard fic? She complained I was embellishing her names, but Gastrell got ‘the Munificent’. Everyone deserves an epithet. He’s not as impressive as Zazzerpan, but what’s left of that guy is catching rays like the Statue of Liberty proclaiming that we’re still on the planet of the mages. I saved Rose when he got sucked into a flaming tornado. Did she ever tell you that?”

“You’ve mentioned how you were a big hero,” John says shortly.

“I saw that in the clouds once,” Jade chimes in before you can get ruffled at his tone.

“See, you were snooping first. Can’t complain about us breaking and entering when you were getting your perv on even before you could ambush innocents in the shower.”

That earns you a long suffering sigh. “I told you, I needed to get your opinion on dinner, and it’s not like you’re ever wearing pants.”

“It’s the principle of the thing. A man should be able to perform his daily ablutions in peace without mannerless furries barging in and oogling him.

“Who said I was oogling?”

“Jade has no concept of social norms, we are all aware of this,” John says. “Now let’s continue her education in what is appropriate among friends by exploring Rose’s house while she’s not here.”

Right, the tour. You won’t walk them through your sister’s bedroom – that seems like pushing your welcome – but you do flip on the copper-plated vacuum for some ambient noise and take turns trying to spot Derse from the observatory. Rose’s mom’s bedroom-turned-personal bar got trashed by SBURB-related hijinks, so Jade spends a few minutes levitating rubble while John blows away dust. You lift a fallen bottle that survived the chaos. It didn’t survive your timeline, but not because of property damage. “Maybe we should throw all this out.”

“Why?” Jade asks. Her hands are outstretched, directing a chunk of wall bigger than she is to throw itself into the sea. “It seems rude to do that without asking.”

“Besides.” John is doing his best impression of a vacuum cleaner. They should start a sibling flippers show on HGTV. “Nanna uses it for cooking sometimes.”

“Oh, you know, three teens with no fake IDs, boatload of amphibians who get into anything. I don’t want to be held responsible for any ragers. End up tossing a 40 to the ground and yelling scatter when the space cops show up because our neighbors called to complain about the noise pollution.” They don’t seem convinced by your rationale, so you drop it. You’re not going to tell them about Rose. That’s her secret to share. Doesn’t count for this one, anyway. No more desperate straits, no more drinking. Still, you’re glad she’s far away from her mother’s stash.

That concludes the house tour, so you take the tunnel down to the beach. “Rose told me this used to be hidden under her cat’s tomb,” you say, trailing a hand along its reinforced walls. “Who builds a crypt for their cat?”

“It’s better than mounting its head on your wall.” Jade sticks her tongue out. “I never liked my grandpa’s trophies.”

She hasn’t volunteered her house for tours yet. Must be saving it for a rainy day. “It used to open out in some secret Skaianet lab, so the weird shit keeps coming. Don’t think Rose knew if her mom _had_ a job.”

“Parents hide a lot.” John scuffs a foot through the sand. “Do you think they knew?”

You’re silent, wondering. It would explain some things. Like how Bro kept telling you that you needed to be prepared but wouldn’t explain why. John’s dad and Rose’s mom had known each other. Were they all members of the same apocalypse preppers cult? If they’d met, why couldn’t you? Touring Rose’s house wouldn’t be a novelty if you’d been in and out all the time. You could’ve seen how the rest of the world lived instead of walking through its remnants and imagining.

Light glances off your shades; the tunnel has spat you out onto the beach. The three of you wander along the edge of the water. Pink cliffs climb on your right hand side, and rubble dots the sand where the water has scooped out dripping caves. The beach leads into one, and you follow. The boom of water crashing against rock jars your teeth. You scoop up a handful of sand and let it trickle through your fingers. “Cool shells wash up here sometimes. I used to come down here before, see what I could find.”

Neither of them point out that you should have been in mourning. Turns out grief doesn’t work like that. You can’t shut everything out; the world slips through. Something catches your attention. For a moment, you forget. It’s the only way to survive.

This is you, forgetting.

“Oh neat, is this a fossil?” John says, and the rest of you cluster around where he’s pointing. You pass his find around, and then Jade picks up a gnarled length of driftwood she says would make Executus the Constipated a magic stave, and the hunt for more washed up treasures is on. This could have been a day in the real world, if your guardians had let you in on whatever secrets they’d been hiding. It could have been a day in a timeline headed nowhere, back when you and Rose walked this beach alone. But it’s not. It’s here. It’s now. And that’s what you’re going to remember.


	14. Jade

**March 21, 2010 (Year One)**

_6:00 am._

Wake up. You used to wake with the sun no matter when you set your alarm, so you stopped setting it. Now there’s no sun, and your ears don’t recognize the alarm when it goes off. You wake up when you wake up.

Get out of bed. Pull on clothes. Make sure the ship hasn’t drifted off course during your dreams. Do your best to forget the dreams.

_7:00 am._

Eat breakfast. Floral tea is good for starting the morning. Grab some fruit and you’re ready to go.  If John’s grandmother is in the kitchen, she’ll offer you a scone or cinnamon roll to add to your plate, and you’ll take it to be polite. Baked goods early in the day sit heavy on your stomach. You’re not used to them. Today she’s off with the carapaces, so you escape.

John joins you around eight, usually. Davesprite either beats you there or doesn’t leave his room until the afternoon. It depends on whether he slept. He’s not here this morning. Be disappointed. Wonder why you’re disappointed. Be brusque with John because you’re trying to figure that out.

_8:30 am._

Equipment check. Your course is fine, but what about the engines? Boilers? Torpedoes, in case you run into anything out here. Consorts meddle. Pieces break. Entropy is always running. Nothing is a closed system. Stay alert.

_10:00 am._

Finish your checkups with a survey of your supplies (someone will need to alchemize more flour soon) and drift for a while. Peer in at groups of carapaces. Wish you were brave enough to approach them or they were brave enough to approach you. Hum a lullaby you learned on Prospit without realizing it. Realize it. Stop humming.

_11:00 am._

Early lunch. You snacked through the day on your island rather than sitting down for meals, grabbing something when you happened to pass by your greenhouse or by the pantry. Lunch on the ship isn’t a sit down affair either most of the time. Avoid the ‘John’s experiment – do not eat’ bag in the fridge containing an Ultimate Gusher still under construction. So far, it has absorbed several yards of fruit roll-ups. At this rate he won’t have any teeth left.

_12 noon._

Train. Firearms remain outside your comfort zone, but you practice Space. Toss stones at a ring that’s too small for them. The rules of the game you’ve come up with: try to shrink the stones down enough to pass through the ring and resize them as soon as they make it. Precision is the focus here. Control is important. (You’re not sure whether it’ll matter where you’re going.)

_12:30 pm._

Wonder what’s waiting for you. Flip through your dream journal for the hundredth time in case you missed a clue. Wish Rose was here to help make sense of it. Even the trolls might have information to share underneath their taunts and weird spellings and lots of personal problems. You’ve combed through their logs too, looking.

_1:00 pm._

You’re supposed to be training. Practice identifying atoms for fun. Level up with a shivery fizz that runs through you head to toe like gulping down painless lightning. Wonder if John feels it the same way or if this is a game guide bonus. Try to check your sprite’s internal database for details on the stats you bumped up. Get a ‘files moved or deleted’ error. Remember you don’t want any of her in your head anyway.

_2:00 pm._

Let John tug you away to continue your cultural education. Genuinely enjoy Princess Mononoke.  Throw popcorn at him while he tries to catch pieces in his mouth. When he misses too many times, nudge the kernels with your powers to correct their aim.

_5:00 pm._

Garden. The hummingbirds like salvia, so you’ve been filling pots of it to take outside. They’ll land on your hand if you put it close enough to the blossoms, a feeling like cupping your hands around someone’s laughter. A few of your passion flowers are doing well enough that you’ll be able to take cuttings soon. It’ll be nice to have vases of blooms around, even if everything seems to clash with yellow.

_6:00 pm._

Dinner. Nanna insists on at least one sit down meal. It was John’s turn to cook, and he’s getting better. Compliment him on his spaghetti wrangling skills. It’s an odd thing to praise someone for, but he seems pleased. Take a second portion, regret about half of it. You’ve grown at least an inch since the game started. The girl in your attic would be shorter than you now.

_7:00 pm._

Help Nanna do the dishes. Respond when she asks you about your day. “I’d like to see your garden sometime,” she says. “I won’t boast of a green thumb like yours, but I did have a victory garden during the war.”

Say you’ll be happy to give her a tour any time she likes. Think yours is sort of a victory garden too, in a way.

_8:00 pm._

Play a few rounds of the Risk game that’s been sitting in the common area all month. John has strategically seized most of Europe. Davesprite has been reduced to endlessly fortifying Japan. You’re partial to conquering countries you would have liked to visit someday. You drop a miniature on the United States before the three of you break for the night.

_9:00 pm._

Race everyone to see who claims the only working shower first. God Tier and game guide powers are forbidden. Add ‘fix showers’ to your mental list of chores for tomorrow. Lean against the wall when you lose and shout a conversation through the door, towel draped over your shoulder.

_10:00 pm._

Sleep. You’ve always been good at that.

_1:00 am._

You’ve always been good at _falling_ asleep. Staying asleep is harder these days. Jerk awake. Bite one of your nails instead of your tongue. Listen for a knock at your door, if it’s one of those nights. Everyone’s nightmares don’t always align. Remember that most dreams are random medleys of thoughts and images instead of heavy handed reminders of what you’ve been through. Feel kind of cheated that your brain is ignoring science again. But then, you are shrunk down and hurtling through inter-dimensional space powered by what’s left of your magic dog. You probably don't want the laws of the universe to start paying attention now.

_2:00 am._

Hear the knock. Get up to let Davesprite in and then curl back under the covers while he drapes himself over your desk chair. Listen to him crack jokes about pointless things. Debate whether you would rather live in the Pokémon or Digimon universes. Don’t ask what woke him. Don’t share what woke you. Do reach out and feel John tossing and turning, eyes squeezed shut. He got night terrors on Prospit. You hope that’s not what’s happening now. He could be doing something active in a dream bubble, his waking body reflecting his dreaming form. You hope that’s it.

Stop spying. Make an arch comment about Texan culture that you know will start Davesprite ranting and one-up each other with conspiracy theories about the true and nefarious origins of homecoming mums.

_3:30 am._

Notice your eyes are getting heavy. Shoo him out at the first yawn. Yours this time.

_3:45 am._

Sleep. Don’t dream.


	15. John

**April 12, 2010 (Year One)**

It’s 11:43.

You watch the digits flicker on the watch you keep tossing up above your face, catching it with a gust of wind before it lands. There are seventeen minutes until midnight. In seventeen minutes, it will be April 13. You will be fourteen.

It stinks being four months behind everyone else. The unfairness is extra obvious now that you know 4/13 is technically everyone’s birthday, and if the meteors had behaved a little differently you might be the oldest. Last year the others had teased you about not being a teenager. In comparison, fourteen never sounded like an important milestone, but you still feel like the others are members of some secret club you don’t have access to. They act like it sometimes. Maybe they think you don’t notice. You’re not sure _what_ you’re noticing. Maybe you’ll ask tomorrow. Jade will have to tell you the truth, because it will be your birthday. If she cares.

No one has planned a surprise party. The Breeze would have told you if they had. You’re relieved. Your birthday doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to all of you and none of you: the day you played SBURB and the world ended. Is that the kind of thing you throw a party for? Part of you wants to stay in here and sleep through all of it.

That’s not the point of birthdays, though. Birthdays are for celebration and festivities and fun. There are always ways to have fun, if you try.

11:51.

And you are having fun, aren’t you? Why wouldn’t you be? You’re on an extended fantasy vacation with your friends. Plenty of kids would love to skip school for that. You sigh. The gust of breath – stronger than you’d expected – sends your watch flying across the room. It hits the wall and clatters to the floor. You sit up and grab your phone before standing. Flick through Pesterchum, just in case. It would be nice if messages from the others could make it through just this once, for a birthday treat. The universe doesn’t give you that present, though. Jade’s handle is the only one flashing.

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] started pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 11:27 pm -- 

GG: happy birthday!   
GG: i know its not really your birthday for another half hour, but i was having trouble sleeping and thought i would make sure i was the first in a long line of well wishers   
GG: how do you make that confetti effect on the screen again?   
GG: imagine this is confetti ~ ~ ~ ~ ~   
GG: if you need someone to distract your nanna tomorrow so she doesnt bake too many cakes, i will lay down my life for the cause   
GG: anyway i dont want to wake you up with your phone buzzing so ill save the rest for when we get up   
GG: you mentioned youd found something fun to do right? im looking forward to it   
GG: sleep well!!! <3 <3    


Her current status is set to idle, so you don’t respond. Instead, you retrieve your watch.  11:58. Then you float back into bed, holding the timepiece over your face and watching the seconds tick down.

You’d looked forward to your last birthday.

The Breeze whispers through the ship, carrying the chatter of nakkodiles and clack of carapaces’ feet on the floor. It brings traces of what it’s touched, too. The smooth metal walls, the harsh edges of door frames, the five grapefruit-sized planets floating in synced up orbit a few inches above the carpet. Sometimes hearing all that makes it hard to sleep. Tonight you let it wash over you without really listening and stare at your watch. Five seconds. Three.

Zero. Midnight. You’re fourteen. Five worlds keep turning.

Welcome to year two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, year 2, the one I am least equipped for. Expect updates to continue to be sporadic as my aro ace ass wrestles with writing doomed teen relationships.


	16. Davesprite

**April 14, 2010**

“John was asking about you,” Jade says.

You snort. You’re not feeling warm and fuzzy toward yesterday’s birthday boy. He didn’t bother inviting you to play his Ghostbusters game (although this could be interpreted as an act of mercy) and once you logged on he spent most of his time dissing you. Who says your jokes have gotten worse?

You think, you _hope_ , it’s not out of malice. John has never been a master of tact. But his comments make you second guess yourself. You catch yourself asking, is this something Dave Strider would do? Would he choose that shirt, make that joke, laugh that hard? This used to come without effort.

You’ve played this game before. In the other timeline, you looked at the doomed doubles that piled up behind you and came up with all sorts of reasons to distance yourself. You wouldn’t have gone that way, picked that weapon, made those mistakes. No matter how minute the difference, you found a reason why they weren’t you.

So who are you?

Much later, after you’ve hit rock bottom and clawed your way back up, John will ask if he did that to you. You will tell him no, you did plenty of it to yourself. He simply has a knack for pushing people toward what they might already have done. Like now. Whatever John said to her, Jade is thinking about it. She fiddles with one of her ears, an anxious gesture you guess is as close as she can get to the comfort of petting her dog. It’s kind of cute, actually. “Really he was asking about both of us.”

“Great. Did he give you another lecture about fraternizing with the enemy? Careful, I might steal your power-ups.”

She frowns but doesn’t jump to his defense. Yesterday was pretty blatant; you don’t think the MMORPG even _had_ teams before your glorious leader made that pronouncement. “He’s noticed we’ve been spending a lot of time together. He asked what I thought Dave would think.”

“Why does that matter?” you ask, like you’re not a step away from wearing a WWDD version of the bracelets they hand out at church camps.

“Well.” She stretches the word out, the way she’d fill a whole line with extra l’s on pesterchum. “I think he thinks we might be dating.”

…Oh. “He does?” you say after a moment, which contributes nothing to the conversation except buying some time. Not that you have any idea what you’re going to do with it.

She chews her lip. “I didn’t know how to answer him. I don’t actually know what that looks like in real life.”

“Don’t look at me,” you say when she does just that. Your response paints a pretty sad picture of your life – at least Jade had the excuse of total isolation – so you add, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m eligible as fuck. Not my fault my neighborhood suffered from a chronic lack of taste. The CDC came down and took tongue swabs from everyone, then issued a travel advisory. The case made it into someone’s med school dissertation. I think the title was “Local populace unbelievably obtuse to diamond in their midst, mass affliction proven incurable.”

“That sounds more like a headline than a dissertation title.”

“Don’t you think an oversight that big is newsworthy?”

You’ve relaxed into a familiar pattern of riffing on each other – it’s what you’d do to try to shake Rose off from a line of questioning, even if your sister had a heat-seeking missile’s persistence for getting back on track. So it throws you off when she raises her eyebrows and leans forward. “Very. Maybe you should do something about it instead of being silly. How does it go? In movies I think you would ask me to go somewhere at some specific time, like, for example, seven p.m. on LOWAS. And then my closest male relative would threaten you with a gun. Which does sound like something grandpa would do,” she muses, “but he wouldn’t mean it personally. He did that to most things that moved.”

You lean back. “Are you threatening me or asking me out?”

“Technically I’m describing you asking me out.” Her smile wavers. “Unless you…”

“No. That sounds… That sounds good.” You weren’t expecting this, is all. It’s not like you hadn’t thought about it after the time you’ve spent hanging out, or even idly before the game. But it’s hard to read someone who’s determined to be nice to everyone, even the game constructs sharing this boat with you, and harder to know what your place is when you’re one of them. There’s a real Dave Strider out there who doesn’t keep fumbling his lines. John must be wondering the same thing that you are: would anyone pick you if they had a choice?

Dave’s not here, though. You’re the one who’s spent the last year telling your Egbert-deemed adequate jokes and experimenting with Doritos flavored ramen and fending off nightmares. These past twelve months have been yours. Maybe it’s alright if they wouldn’t have been his.

What would Dave Strider do? For the next two years, you will try to stop caring.

“Seven p.m. on LOWAS,” you repeat. “I thought of everything, huh?”

Her smile comes back. “And you asked so politely, too.”

“Like I said, eligible as hell.”

Once you’ve congratulated yourself for navigating that conversation, a new phase of panic sets in. You’ve never been on a date. You already hang out, though, which was enough to make John suspicious. So maybe you can just… hang out? But officially. That sounds doable. 

This interpretation takes a hit when Jade shows up at seven in a sparkly black and white dress with voluminous enough skirts to keep the stuffiest of chaperones happy. You look down at your own standard issue t-shirt. “Oh shit, was this a black tie occasion?”

She twirls, and the skirt flares out further in a cloud of sequins and ruffles. “No, but I had fun making something new. It’s kind of like a design I tried on LOFAF, except this one you can run in.”

“Because who needs mobility in those circumstances.” Wildlife wrangling duties is one part of your quest you didn’t mind skipping. “I think Steve Irwin said silk is the best fabric when handling amphibians.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time! We are all victims of fashion sometimes. Dave wore a series of very snappy suits part of the time while we were frog hunting, which were not very practical either even if they were much warmer than what I had on.”

That’s how you wanted to kick this evening off: talking about your other self. You remember alchemizing clothes too, but these days it’s an effort to manage your appearance. Stray feathers ruffle your wings, and your hair needs cutting. It’s hard looking into a mirror and seeing something so different than what you wanted to be. “Next time I’ll wear a fancy-ass hat, very ‘British gentry flaunting their old money at the racetrack’. Think I could glue a nakkodile on as an ornament if I leave it some snacks?”

She doesn’t comment on the ‘next time’. Instead, she offers you her arm so she can teleport you both down to the planet’s surface (she’s got a monopoly on transportation here) and you take it.

John complains that LOWAS is dreary, but you like it. LOHAC scorched your lungs and left your ears ringing; in the last timeline you’d spent as much time on LOLAR as you could, but it wasn’t easy on the eyes. Low clouds and cool breezes make LOWAS sleepy and peaceful. You walk along the gravel paths, trying to skip stones over lakes of oil and daring each other to bite into one of the glowing mushrooms popping out of the dirt. A salamander tugs at Jade’s sleeve and offers to sell her a magic lantern. 500 boonbucks later, she’s holding a jar of fireflies. “The poor things,” she says, lifting it to look at the insects bouncing off the sides of the glass.

“You didn’t make firefly lanterns as a kid?”

“I didn’t have them. The wildlife on my island was…” She grimaces. “Limited.”

“They’re all over the place in the summer.” Not a lot made it to your rooftop, but on some warm nights you’d leave to buy more milk or a packet of chips and detour to the nearest patch of green. It was nice to hold on to something alive and brilliant, to feel it tapping against your fingers until you spread your hands and set it free. “Standard part of the American childhood package. Whenever you saw one you’d try to catch it.”

“Why?”

She’s asked why people rolled in the snow to make distorted angels, and you didn’t have an answer then either. “It’s just what you do.”

“Not me. I think they should be free.” She twists the cap off. It takes the fireflies a few seconds to realize their sentence has been lifted. Then they stream out of the jar while the salamander croaks protests. “I bought it, I break it,” Jade says, and it stops to digest that piece of garbled retail wisdom. Most of the liberated insects drift toward the clouds, but a few hover near you, blinking. You swipe at one and it evades your hand, flashing a reproach.

She giggles. “They must think you’re a big firefly.”

You do glow faintly in the LOWAS dusk. “Great, I’m telling a bunch of bugs I’m DTF.” You tweak your luminosity setting and they lose interest, following the rest upward to disappear into the haze. John’s quest has something to do with those heavy clouds, but you’re not his Player. You don’t know the details.

“I get it,” Jade says. “You do want to chase them.” She grabs your hand. She’s done it a few times to catch your attention or drag you along, but it’s still a surprise every time she does it. It will always be a surprise. You’ve learned by now to hold on. So you do, and she tugs you into the sky after the vanishing lights. “The supply planes never delivered that part of the standard package. Come on. I want to catch up.”


	17. Jade

**May 22, 2010**

“I’m not going to ask,” John says when you get back.

Davesprite fishes a leaf out of his hair. “I fell out of a tree.”

“There was a toad!” you contribute.

“The tree was on a cliff. The cliff was above a river.” He wipes a muddy hand on his equally muddy shirt. “Fill in the blanks of this wacky mad lib yourself.”

John usually doesn’t want to hear anything about your dates, but this drags a follow-up question out of him. “Can’t you fly?”

“It took me by surprise.”

“The tree or the toad?”

That makes you giggle, but Davesprite drifts off mumbling to himself, so you wave goodbye and follow. It’s rare for John to say much on the topic, let alone have a sense of humor about it. You tried to bring it up once not long after he found out. You will be spending two more years in close quarters together, after all. That’s a long time for awkward silences. You’d settled down next to him on the sofa, where he was fast forwarding through a cartoon, jabbing button after button on the remote. “Is something bothering you?”

He pressed play, and the action jumped into normal motion. “I’m fine.”

That was a phrase you knew from long years of using it not to take seriously. “I didn’t think us telling you would make you upset. You’re the one who brought it up.”

His eyes didn’t leave the screen, but his mouth tightened. “I’m not upset! I mean, it’s kind of weird, but –”

It _is_ weird. Weird that two usernames you added to your chumroll because of a mistimed birthday present became your brother and boyfriend, that the roles of people in your life can change and keep changing until you don’t recognize where you started. Weird, like pressing a seed into the dirt and waiting to see what comes up. The way he said it didn’t sound like that, though. It sounded almost like an accusation. “He’s your best friend. I thought you’d be –”

He cut you off before you could finish. “He’s not. Regular Dave is. You’re the one who said they’re not the same.”

The force behind his voice startled you. Your ears went back reflexively. ‘They’re not the same,’ you wanted to say, and you wanted to say, ‘they’re same enough.’ Same enough to still be his friend.

“I’m not upset,” he repeated over your silence. “I’m getting used to it, that’s all.”

You didn’t want to fight. And he sounded earnest, looking at you now and away from the television screen. It was an adjustment, you reminded yourself. The last fourteen months had been nothing but adjustments for all of you. John is your brother. He’s your friend. He’d always been kind and understanding beneath his tendency to give you a hard time at first. This would blow over, and everything _would_ be fine. “I know it makes things a little different, but I hope it’s not _too_ weird.”

He cracked a smile. “We are two secretly related immortals traveling at the speed of light between universes, Jade. Everything we do is weird.”

You laughed. “That’s a good point.” In pesterchum, you would type in a heart to end the conversation by showing that you cared. It’s harder to know how to do that face to face. Those little gestures are the kind of thing it’s easier to have been born with. You settled for squeezing his hand. He didn’t squeeze back, but he did hit the pause button again. The characters on the screen froze, holding their positions and looking out at you. They were smiling. They would keep smiling until someone pressed play.

In the present, you trail after Davesprite as he continues muttering under his breath. You’d offer to teleport the worst of the dirt off, but you think he prefers to have something to complain about. “What happened to coffee shops, you didn’t see people coming back covered in pond scum from taking their dates to coffee shops. Unless it’s one of those hipster vegan places where that’s what they’re serving.”

“There aren’t a lot of options,” you say. Over a year into your trip, the collection of games and DVDs in everyone’s homes has been picked over. You’ve returned to combing your lands for entertainment. The planets aren’t big, designed as they are for a player to explore during the length of a normal game session, but compared to your island they’re luxurious.

“Not going to win any awards, though. It gets boring, right?” He shakes another leaf out of his hair and watches it flutter toward the ground. That you do send away in a flash of green; there’s no point in leaving a mess. “Not gonna blame you if you decide you’ve got better things to do with your time.”

“I don’t know what that would be.” You never had anything much better. “What would you do back on Earth?”

He hesitates, and you suspect you’ve missed something somewhere. It can be so frustrating, these gaps in the conversation everyone else expects you to jump across. You’re drawing from a significantly smaller sample size. If only people could be _clear_. Then he shrugs. “The possibilities are limitless. Heckle the guys on the corners passing out Jesus pamphlets. Watch kids wipe out at the skate park. Try to eat a full bag of chips before the pigeons get you. Actually,” he’s warming to his subject now, “if I was on Earth right now we could go to the museum. This is in a kinder alternate universe where I wasn’t banned for life, obviously.”

“Oh no, what did you do?”

“Bro thought he could spice up one of his videos with a scene in the hall of Texan wildlife, and I guess they frown on adding homemade puppets to the bighorn sheep diorama. Everyone always blames the production crew.”

You purse your lips. You faced your own share of scolding for trying to play with your grandfather’s silly old exhibits. If he valued the integrity of his stuffed animals so much, he should not have left them within arm’s reach. “They sound cruel and unforgiving.”

“If you’re not getting the evil eye from the docents it’s pretty great. They’ve even got the dinosaurs posed like they’re running wild instead of standing in line for their school photos. I appreciate the dedication to realism when everything’s got the flesh stripped off its bones. And of course the crown jewel of the whole place is the gift shop.”

“That’s the best part?”

“Hands down. There were these bins of rocks you could stick your arms in all the way to the wrist. You could buy astronaut ice cream, which I would not recommend.” He makes a face. If the three of you are astronauts – and the distinction is a little vague – at least you are not eating everything freeze dried. “And some plush dinosaurs you’d like. I had one for a while before it met the same violent end everything stuffed in our household did. Cal brooked no competitors.”

“That does sound nice.” The gift shop part does, at least. You decide not to comment on the rest.  

“It was nice.” The past tense lands like a meteorite in the middle of your conversation. He clears his throat and fiddles with the feathers around his neck. “Guess it must be easier not having seen any of it. You don’t have to miss museum gift shops or the way it smelled when you walked into a café, or anything about what it was like before.”

Is it easier? Alone on your island you’d watched television and movies, rapt, imagining yourself rubbing shoulders with those fictional, everyday people. You were a princess locked in a tower, and your dreamed-of fairy tale ending was to be mundane. That world is gone now, but you were missing it even before it was gone. “In some ways I’m sure it’s easier. But I do wish I had memories like the rest of you. I always had to borrow yours.”

He’s quiet for a moment, and you worry you’ve committed another faux pas mentioning something about your life that should’ve been left alone. Sometimes a detail (learning to stitch up your own leg, the age you were when your grandfather died) leaves them both silent and staring, and you scold yourself for making trouble no one needs. Some secrets are better kept. Then he nods, and you relax. “Well god knows I’ve got an unlimited check out policy when it comes to talking about myself. Pull out your library card, what do you want to borrow?”

Talking about him is perfect. There are no places to misstep there. Besides, you want to know more about what you’ll never get to see. “Tell me more about the museum. I’d like to visit.”

He leans back in midair (a pose he and John are both fond of; you prefer feeling the ground under your feet) and closes his eyes. You close yours too and try to imagine walking through the front doors of a museum on a regular day on Earth. Something fictional. Something everyday. “Ok, there was a whole wing for propaganda about oil drilling because it’s Texas and they probably bribed them out of the Groom Children to Exploit Our Planet Fund, and there was this chemistry wing I didn’t spend much time in but you’d love, even if none of the experiments are as cool as what you can do now. So the first thing you see when you walk in is this big wall covered in the periodic table…”


	18. John

**June 18, 2010 (Year Two)**

There’s not a lot of room on a battleship, but there _are_ a lot of rooms. They’re small and cramped, not built for a human who’s shot up another few inches since your birthday, but they make up for that in numbers. You’re not even sure what some of these are for.

This one was storage, you think. Crates stamped with the Prospitian crest pile against the walls in shadowy mounds under the burned-out light bulb. They’re covered in a layer of dust that makes you sneeze every time you walk in. No one’s disturbed them since you left the session. No one except you, anyway. The only prints in the dust are your own.

There is one other feature in the room besides the boxes and the dust: a window. It’s a small porthole, and all you can see is the same endless blur of black and green, but you like to lean your forehead against the glass and watch the distance speed by. Inside and away from windows, it feels like you’re not moving at all.

The door swings open, nearly catching your foot. You scoot back and blink at the sudden light. Nanna hovers in the opening. “Oh, excuse me. I didn’t see you there, dear!”

“Sorry,” you say, squinting while your eyes adjust. “I didn’t think anyone would come here.”

“Normally I wouldn’t, but I heard a rumor that there were some genuine moon-milled ration bars in the aft storage compartment, and the troops have been clamoring for a taste of home.” She pries open a crate with her free-floating hand to reveal slabs of what you guess could be considered food, if you were a desperate chess person who didn’t know any better. “What are you doing tucked away like this?”

“I don’t know.” You give her your best nonchalant shrug. “I couldn’t think of anything better to do.”

Nanna smiles most of the time. You’re not sure if that’s because of the harlequin prototyping or some requirement of being a grandmother or just a family tradition. She’s still smiling when she shakes her head and clicks her tongue. “Surely three bright youngsters can keep themselves entertained longer than this. When I was a child my brother and I kept ourselves busy without any technology at our fingertips more advanced than skipping ropes.”

You press your forehead back against the window. “Oh, _they’re_ fine at keeping themselves busy.”

“Ah yes.” She drifts into the room, even though hanging out with your grandmother only rubs in your current state of abandonment. “You’ll have to excuse them. Your first relationship can go to your head for a while. You’ll understand one day.”

Says who? “I wouldn’t be this…” Stupid? “I don’t see why it’s such a big deal, and why it’s so much better than hanging out with your friends.”

She shrugs. You suppose a one hundred year old ghost clown is not much more of a romantic expert than you, when you get down to it. “I wouldn’t say it’s better. It’s different. You were too young for any of that on Earth, I suppose?”

“I guess… People talked about it at school, but I had better things to think about. I wouldn’t change my whole life for a dumb girl.” Not that you’re trying to say your sister is dumb. You’re talking in generalities here.

She chuckles. “We’ll see. You’d be surprised how much your feelings can change growing up.”

That’s what people told you in the past when you rolled your eyes at the lunch table over middle school gossip about who liked who. Wait, one day you’ll have crushes on something besides your movie posters. You’ll understand once you stop being such a kid about everything. “Why does that have to mean growing up? I don’t see anything all that grown up about it.”

That makes her stop to consider for a moment, and then she nods like you’ve scored a point. “I suppose it doesn’t have to if you don’t want it to.” 

But you do want it, don’t you? Or you will, eventually. You want to do normal things like normal people. You just won’t be obsessed or forget about the other people in your life when you do. You’re being the reasonable one here focusing on the big picture and the game you’re still stuck in. It’s not like you’re missing something. Right?

Either that or you really are the baby of the group, always trailing four months behind, never understanding the games the big kids are playing. That can’t be true. If you had more people here, it would be different. Then _they_ would be wanting to hang out with _you._

Who would you be going off to spend time with, though? Rose, because Karkat said so? Vriska, because she suggested it, sort of?  Neither feel right, exactly. Whenever you try to envision going on a date with anyone, the scene fizzles out after a few minutes, and you get the same squirmy sensation of waiting for a movie you don’t like to end. Which is about how you feel about this conversation right now, actually.

“In any case,” says the only loosely defined girl who currently wants to spend time with you, “I could use a strong young man to help me carry these crates back to the kitchen. What do you say?”

“Sure,” is what you say. They’re too big for your sylladex, but hauling heavy things around is as good a distraction as any. You heave the first box into your arms while Nanna hefts two easily with her spectral hands. Before you follow her, you take one last look out the porthole. Dark green nothingness whizzes by. You should have taken Jade up on her offer to send you with the others. No one here would even notice if you were gone.


	19. Davesprite

**July 3, 2010 (Year Two)**

The constructs native to the Medium love games. Show them a segmented board populated with colorful pieces and their eyes light up. Put them in front of a screen and they’ll pilot little eight bit men around for hours. It could be the novelty that attracts them, but you wonder if it’s something deeper – if being from a game means that kind of logic appeals to them, feels more right than the real world. It’s understandable. You wouldn’t mind having pre-set dialog options to choose from yourself sometimes.

John set up a Smash tournament as a distraction for the passengers a few days ago, and it’s still going strong. Most of the contestants are Medium locals, but occasionally one of you wanders through and takes a turn. Winner plays the next challenger, and the consorts are terrible, so this afternoon you find yourself picking up the controller alongside him. He narrows his eyes and switches his character. Last year you doctored up the game with mods and alchemization, which added a whole new roster of incredibly broken characters. You’re now facing off against Billy Mays of infomercial fame. After considering your options, you settle on one of those giant horses from the Battlefield. The carapaces like having their own ranks represented in-game. Most of the time, despite the inflated cast list, they stick with playing themselves. Not a lot of imagination in that crowd. Your choice doesn’t offer much in the way of finesse, but you do tower over any opponents.

The match starts, and for the first few minutes the two of you are silent. Most of your attention goes to dodging surprisingly effective sprays of cleaning solution. “You’re getting good at this. I thought these were joke characters, but Billy Mays absolutely should’ve been in Smash.”

John rewards your compliment with a detergent ball to the face. “I’ve been practicing.  Most of the people I’ve played aren’t very good though. The last Dersite tried to eat the triangle button.”

“A bold and innovative strategy.” You barely avoid being knocked off the platform. “We’ll have to hold an all earthlings tournament sometime and see how we do. I think I can resist snacking on the controls as long as we build in regular concession breaks.”

“If you have time for that.”

“Got nothing but.”

He falls quiet, focused on his scrubbing bubbles-strewn path of destruction. The last time you played a game together, he insisted you were an enemy. Does he like it better when you are?

That’s paranoid. No matter the awkward silences or tactless comments, he’s your friend. Roles in a video game don’t change that.

You use your character’s height to maneuver to a platform John’s having trouble jumping up to. That gives you the opportunity to take a breather. “I didn’t play a lot of multiplayer games at home. Sometimes with Bro, but he’d either flatten me or install mods that did shit like render the characters with their skin ripped off. Took the shine off Animal Crossing.”

John leaps, bounces off the edge, and sets down his controller to flex his hands. Maybe he’s grateful for the break too. “Me neither. By the time you’re twelve you stop inviting everyone to your party just because you’re in the same class.”

“Hey, you were invited to ours, remember? And we weren’t even stuck in assigned seating together.” Like you are now.

He bends back his fingers and then shakes them out. “I remember.”

Playing SBURB was John’s special event, but you threw parties to celebrate everyone else’s thirteenth first. Logged in at the same time, sent well wishes on Pesterchum, sung crackly renditions of Happy Birthday over your mics. The plan had been to each eat a slice of cake, but John didn’t want any and Jade couldn’t get some. In your case, you made do with gas station Twinkies and blew out the fuse of a cherry bomb before it could blow. The time spent in front of your computer until everyone else had to log off, one by one, had been the best part of your birthday hands down.

Did any of you sing for John on the day of the game? You don’t remember. Doubt it. As parties go, the last few haven’t been great for him. “We’re supposed to meet everyone on your sixteenth, right? Better keep your skills sharp. Have to keep the flame of humanity alive by trouncing any alien upstarts in the party game of their choice.”

John has figured out a way up to your perch. He resumes mashing buttons, and you fumble for your own controller. “I hope by then we’ll be done with this.”

“Smash?”

“SBURB. How many more final bosses can there be?”

You retreat from his new assault. “Dude, don’t jinx us. Might take a while, there’s hells of loose ends to tie up. What’s the rush now that you’re God Tier? Getting custody of a universe amphibian sounds like mandatory babysitting duty to me, I’d rather slack on the adult responsibilities as long as possible.”

“I want to win.”

No shit. He’s obliterating you. “We all do. Eventually.”

John nods, but you think it’s more to register that you said something than out of agreement. He isn’t looking at you. Despite the intensity of his attack, his tone is casual. Maybe the question isn’t a big deal, to him. “What happens to you when the game ends?”

Your fingers slip, and John blasts you off the platform. Game over. You hand the controller to the nakkodile next in line, who considers the gift and then sits on it. “Don’t know. Good luck with this guy, he’s clearly a master strategist.”

You don’t stick around to watch the next match. Instead you drift off in the general direction of your room before he can ask any more questions. That’s what you’re there for, after all. Asking and answering, within reason. Sprites are game guides. You exist to help players out but not to do their jobs for them. So while you’ve got plenty of intel, you’re encouraged to dole it out with care. Be evasive. Choose your words wisely. Don’t lie, but do the next best thing.

Nothing you said was untrue. Prototyping didn’t bother to share much about the endgame. You don’t _know_ what happens to you after the credits roll and no one needs what’s locked up in your head anymore.

You can take a damn good guess, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing bship crew fics involves walking a tightrope between "I want to have the characters interact" and "canon suggests they were packed securely in Styrofoam for the duration of their journey". It's a Struggle.  
> feat. me trying to remember which celebrities were memeworthy in early 2009.


	20. Jade

**August 12, 2010 (Year Two)**

The Lord of the Rings movies are beautiful. Your grandfather owned copies of the books and you read them a few times each, relishing descriptions of faraway lands and the triumph of humble people against spreading evil. You suspect you might be in the minority, but you’d liked the long poems in made-up languages, let the strange syllables trip over your tongue and glide across your lips. Elbereth, Laurelindórenan. A fantasy vocabulary like the one you learned in your dreams filled with words like Prospit and Incipisphere. Words flavored with far away. The movies make it real. The scenes are so beautiful you struggle to believe a lot of them were shot in actual places on Earth.

The backdrops attract most of your attention, but the others are less impressed. Davesprite groans during another scene between Aragorn and Arwen, which you do _not_ remember from the books. “We get it, they’re in love because elves are _so_ unbelievably beautiful.”

John crosses his arms on your other side. “The scene is almost over, stop complaining.”

“I’m gonna keep complaining as long as they keep trying to sell me on this.”

John twists away from the screen, so you don’t think he’s enjoying this part that much either. “Ok smart guy, who would you date in LOTR?”

“Aragorn, duh,” he says without needing to think about it. “Dude’s called Strider and uses a magic sword, he’s practically family already.”

“Which would be a disqualifier,” you observe.

John is frowning. “Are you joking about Aragorn?”

“No one’s joking about Aragorn.”

He shakes his head and turns to you. “Jade, who would you pick?”

You stroke your chin to give your answer the gravitas it deserves. “There is only one right choice here and that is Galadriel. She has a magic mirror and a ring of power and a beautiful forest to rule.”

Davesprite snaps his fingers. “Shit, I forgot about her. Can we trade?”

“Nope! Enjoy your mortal man doomed to die.”

“Damn it.” He leans over you to raise his eyebrows at John. “You started this. Who’s your fantasy waifu?”

John gestures back at the screen, where the romance is winding to an end. “Arwen, obviously.”

He plops back against the cushions. “Liv Tyler again. That’s so fuckin predictable.”

“What do you think Rose would say?” you ask.

“Knowing Rose?” Davesprite shrugs. “Shelob.”

“Gross,” John says, and Davesprite snickers, and then you watch the rest of the movie in peace.

“I was joking about Shelob, but Rose is into girls,” Davesprite says afterward. “She told me.”

“She didn’t make it much of a secret.” Your mind is still half back in Middle Earth, but you remember Rose monologuing about the girl in her class who’d secured the largest collection of rare Silly Bandz with more attention to detail than necessary when keeping tabs on a rival. Sometimes you sent pictures of pretty dresses on pretty models back and forth, you making admiring comments and Rose deigning to acknowledge if they met her standards. When John started listing generically attractive film characters, she would chime in with something like the queen from _Alien_. It had seemed clear enough.

Apparently that clarity wasn’t universal. “I mean, I guess,” he says. “Always figured she was joking before. Y’know, like who doesn’t talk about which celebrities you’d hypothetically mack on since it’s not like anyone will ever call you on it. That’s within bounds for a typical American adolescence.”

That doesn’t make much sense to you, but not much about adolescence has. “I never understood why it was such a big deal, to be honest! I mean, when there are so many people out there, why would you rule some of them out over something so arbitrary?”

That is just being practical as far as you are concerned, but his eyebrows shoot up. “Wait, really? So you weren’t joking about Galadriel?”

“Why would I?” Rose cloaked her interests in sarcasm or double meanings, but you don’t see the point in hiding whatever you mean to say under three layers of ironic distance. “Well, she is much too old for me so I would not seriously pursue her, but in principle if I had been allowed on a mainland full of beautiful _and_ handsome people, I certainly would not have limited myself right off the bat.”

He looks like he’s about to say something before shutting his mouth and considering it. That is not an uncommon reaction to your comments. After over a year, you wish you had a better grasp on which topics will throw people off. There are so many it’s impossible to keep track. “…Huh. Jade Harley released from social isolation and immediately becomes a major player. The apocalypse prevented your trail of broken hearts.”

You elbow him. “I didn’t say I would go after all of them, now you are just being silly.”

He lets your elbow connect instead of squirming away or jabbing back. You drop your arm and frown – thoughtful silences don’t always bode well. Finally, he glances around like someone might drop out of the vents and says, “Maybe it’s easier to live your truth when you can’t do anything about it and no one’s going to bother you.”

That sobers you. Despite your isolation, you got your share of trolls (and not the alien kind either). The Internet serves as an equalizer that way. Although it wasn’t your favorite genre, you read world history and brushed up on current news when your friends mentioned something brewing. You knew what the world could be like, but you could log off and leave it behind. Would you have lived differently if you’d been in the midst of it with the rest of them? Would it have shaped you into something that fit, if SBURB hadn’t done that first?

Earth: no “middle” before it. A place you wished you could have experienced more of, that Davesprite couldn’t wait to leave behind, that John rarely likes to talk about. Not the Shire and not Mordor. Somewhere imperfect. You can’t go back there, but maybe you can make something better. Somewhere where people won’t care about any of the silly, pointless things they used to hurt each other over.

“No one’s here now,” you say. “So if you decide to leave me for Aragorn I will try to understand.”

Whatever the look he shoots you is, it’s too quick to read. You don’t have the practice the rest of them do at deciphering faces. For years your only impression of a smile was a colon and single parenthesis. Then his expression settles into a regular smile, and whatever else there was disappears like a scene that’s already done playing. “Nah, I’m good.”

(And that’s the last you really talk about it, until much later when Dave’s announcement puts an end to one subject of household gossip and opens up plenty of new ones. Then Davesprite will flop over the back of the couch where you’re busy flipping through a comic book Jake loaned you. “You should’ve pushed me harder down the path of bi enlightenment earlier, I could’ve beaten Dave to his personal revelation.”

“Oh, is he gloating?” you ask without looking up. “Also, bilightenment is a good word.”

“He asked me if I’d worked it out first as a preparatory measure for future gloating. I know his fucking game.”

That sounds convoluted, but you are not about to place yourself between another pair of feuding boys, even if they are feuding ironically. “What did you say?”

“That of course I did. Do you think it’s amateur hour here?” He lifts a hand to wave as Rose sweeps past with an armful of something that appears to be wriggling. “He might’ve bought it if I hadn’t lost my head completely and said I’d always known.”

You will snort and turn another page.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How many scenes can I spin out of tumblr shiposts?  
> According to Wikipedia, Silly Bandz hit the East coast in November of 2009, but Homestuck isn’t real so I can do what I want. On a similar note, Andrew can pry pan Jade out of my cold dead hands.


	21. John

**September 26, 2010 (Year Two)**

The three of you have been scraping the bottom of the barrel lately when it comes to entertainment. Jade criticized your Ghostbusters MMORPG, but even she had trouble looking excited when she suggested a 1000 plus piece puzzle of abstract art. It’s your nanna who comes to your rescue. “There’s a game your father used to play when he was around your age,” she tells you. “It should keep you busy for a while.”

You’d expected another board game, so you were surprised when she returned from LOWAS with a set of worn books, some pads of yellowing graph paper, and a set of dice in different shapes than the usual cubes. Her explanation sounded complicated, but none of you came up with anything better, so you’re now putting the finishing touches on your “character sheets”.

Dave sprite has been scribbling away, and he introduces his creation first. “I’m Orvis Windjammer, a half-orc bard who was adopted by a traveling circus and apprenticed to their calliope player.”

“Half-orc?” Nanna asks. “You’ll take penalties to intelligence and charisma.”

“Don’t care. Orcs are punk rock.”

“Very well.” Nanna flips from the character race to character class section of the player’s handbook. “Be aware that bards have to take levels in fighter, thief, and druid first.”

“Really? Ok, well, the ringmaster is a sadist who doesn’t respect my dream of starting a band and he keeps pushing me down different career paths.”

“Orvis?” you ask. The name sounds familiar. “Like the popcorn?”

He frowns. “I was thinking Orc Elvis. You know, name yourself for the job you want. What kind of popcorn brands are you getting on the west coast?”

“Oh.” That makes a lot more sense. “I meant Orville Redenbacher.”

“That’s good, I’m using that.” Dave sprite erases his original name and jots the new one down. “He was named by the concession stand manager and eats only popcorn, dipping dots, and cotton candy. As far as he’s concerned any other food is toxic, and he has to roll a psychosomatic constitution save when faced with vegetables.”

You roll your eyes. Of course he’s not taking any of this seriously.

“I want to go next!” Jade rustles her papers. “Starstrand Wildwood is an elf who’s spent most of her life in the forest, but her people noticed mysterious monsters coming past their borders and damaging the trees, so she’s entered the mortal world to investigate. She doesn’t know a lot about human society, and she’s not very comfortable with strangers. Her sylvan skills make her a level one ranger. She speaks Elvish, Common, and Fey.”

“Oh, right.” Dave sprite consults his sheet. “Orville speaks Orcish, Common, and Clown.”

“Clown?” you ask. “That’s a language?”

“It’s heavy on the gestures.”

“My character is Matthew the Mighty,” you say before he can demonstrate.

“Like Matthew McConaughey?” Jade asks.

“No.” (Yes.)

 “Sounds like a magician,” Dave sprite says. “Matthew the Magnificent.”

“Will you let me finish?” You clear your throat. “He’s a humble blacksmith who wants to protect his village from the evil forces that threaten it. He’s a fighter who uses a hammer after having to defend himself with his blacksmith’s tools during an earlier invasion.”

As requested, Dave sprite let you finish, but now he starts up again. “Really pushing the envelope, huh?”

“At least I’m following the normal rules of fantasy. Besides, Jade is clichéd too.”

“Can’t argue with that.” He turns to her. “Is Starstrand a secret princess?”

She sticks her tongue out. “Maybe.”

“You don’t have to share all your characters’ pasts right away,” Nanna interjects. “In fact, play is more fun if you don’t.” (You nod. That’s why you aren’t telling anyone that your character’s grandfather is a powerful lich who concealed his phylactery in a family heirloom, not that Matthew knows its true powers. Dave sprite won’t be able to say that you’re boring then.) She sets up a screen to hide whatever she has prepared with her set of papers and dice. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

A week of real time later, the three of you have battled your way to the central chamber of the evil sorceress’s castle. You have a war hammer plus three and a few special powers thanks to your grandfather’s influence, which tempts you down the path of corruption. Jade is tailed by her loyal wolf companion Curie. Dave sprite finally took levels in druid. You are as ready as you will ever be.

“The sorceress rears back from your strike and bares her rows of sharp teeth. Her golden crown begins to glow.” A die rolls behind Nanna’s screen. “Jade, dear, save versus magic.”

She does. “Um, four?”

Nanna clicks her tongue. “The sorceress casts Charm Person. Boys, you see Starstrand draw her bow and turn to loose an arrow at…” She peers at your map, where your three figurines are arrayed against a fourth. The wicked sorceress is represented by a Swedish fish you dug out from between the sofa cushions. Jade is a leaf, you are one of the little army men from the Risk game box, and Dave sprite is a piece of popcorn also from between the couch cushions. It makes for a heroic scene. “Orville.”

“You shouldn’t have rolled to seduce the final boss,” you say as Dave sprite marks down his damage.

“It’s a classic. I’m next in the order, right?” He squints down at his sheet. “Don’t want to let her split the party. I think I’ll try –”

“If you say a seduction roll, I’m using my action to hit you with my hammer.”

“I was going to say I cast Hold Person on her until she snaps out of it.” He thumbs through the spell book. “She's frozen in place for five melee rounds. Fail another saving throw for me, Jade.” She does, and he reaches across the board to flip the leaf upside down. “She’s all yours, dude.”

“Hang on,” Jade says. “Does Charm Person impact my animal companion?”

Nanna checks. “I don’t believe so.”

“Curie acts in my best interests, so she should still be opposed to the sorceress.”

“Unless she loyally copies you. I’ll tell you what, if you roll under her intelligence score, I’ll agree with you.”

This time Jade rolls a seven and claps her hands together. “She’s going to bite her.”

“In the ass,” Dave sprite contributes. “Save against that.”

“And while she’s distracted, I’ll smash her cursed crown,” you say.

“Hold on, hold on, we need to roll for everything.” Nanna is scribbling figures with her free hand, but she’s chuckling too. “Brought low by a nip to the rear, how unflattering.”

A hammer blow demolishes the source of the wicked sorceress’s powers, and the three of you banish her to one of the furthest layers of the abyss. “Of course,” Nanna intones, “there is still her master to reckon with. Are you ready to face him?”

Dave sprite yawns. “Not today.”

Your legs have fallen asleep. You tilt to one side, trying to shake feeling back into them.  “We need to sell all our treasure and buy more equipment first.”

Jade sighs. “It would be nice if we could save the day and have it stay saved.”

“There is always a bigger bad guy somewhere in fantasy.” You punch at the muscle of your thigh, sending pins and needles racing through it. “It is a genre convention.”

“Not to mention it keeps the game going.” Nanna scoops her dice back into their bag. “But I am supposed to aid my Player, and preparing all of you to face the challenges ahead with teamwork and strategy is one way to accomplish that.”

“I won’t try to seduce Jack Noir, scout’s honor,” Dave sprite says.

Jade’s eyebrows furrow. “If I’d known this was a training exercise, I would have put more thought into it.”

Nanna waves off her concern. “No, I wanted you to enjoy yourselves. And I can’t claim that this is a very accurate simulation. It’s difficult for me to prepare you to any great degree. I know so little beyond the shape of the board and the pieces upon it.

Dave sprite pops the piece of popcorn into his mouth. You wrinkle your nose, remembering its origin. “Yeah, us and whatever poor shmucks picked the wrong birthday game this time around.”

She shakes her head. “Oh, we already know who the players will be.”

“We do?” you ask. 

“Of course! You helped make them and send them on their way, don’t you remember?”

“But…” You remember making one set of babies out of slime, but you watched them grow up in to you and your guardians. Could you have missed a whole other set?  Becoming a parent should not be that easy.

“The Scratch replicates and rearranges the delivery order, that’s all,” Nanna says serenely. “I do believe you’ll be meeting us. Your guardians, so to speak, although they won’t have played that role this time around.” She adjusts her glasses, taking in your expressions. “Were you not aware of that? “

There’s silence. Jade’s dog ears are pricked, even though your nanna wasn’t talking quietly. Dave sprite has stopped chewing. It looks like he’s stopped breathing. You feel… blank, an absence where there should probably be some sort of feeling, but you imagine you can hear your heartbeat pounding in your ears. “No,” you say. “We didn’t know that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> D&D episodes are still cool, right? If the rules seem off, I learned to play from my father’s old AD&D books from decades ago. Shoutout to a friend for Jade’s fittingly terrible character name. If you want more Thoughts on the subject, check out [this post on the Betas playing D&D](https://deliverusfromsburb.tumblr.com/post/145927885283/so-i-think-ive-heard-that-you-dd-and-this-is-a).  
> I’m having a tough semester and I worry I’ve posted some chapters I’m not as happy with because I wanted to put something up, so I’m going to put a pin on this until I’m on break so I can make sure I’m posting work I’m proud of. See you this winter!


	22. Davesprite

**October 4, 2010 (Year Two)**

There should be more places to brood on a battleship.

John’s lurking in that storage area he thinks nobody else knows about. Jade can find you in your room. (She knows where to find you anywhere, but stowing yourself somewhere unusual sends the message that you want to be left alone.) Carapaces and consorts keep interrupting with requests for you to help with a can opener or the garbled remnants of fetch quests they’re still trying to complete. Didn’t the designers of this boat plan to accommodate a bunch of angsting teenagers? Two out of ten, would not recommend.

You’ve settled for what could be called, with tongue firmly in cheek, the crow’s nest. The ship doesn’t have any of those, but it does have some structures built up on the deck. Some might be radar or anti-aerial weapons, you’re not sure. Sprite info didn’t include blueprints for the carapacian war machine. A few of the spires are broad enough at the top to curl up on if you’re not afraid of falling. You still are, sometimes – a reflexive lurch when you look down and think _hey, my feet aren’t touching the ground_ – but it’s like waking up from a dream. A quick jerk, and then life catches up with you. Local idiot thinks he still has feet, can you believe that?

You’ve got a quarter in your hand. Not a boondollar, an actual defunct Earth quarter that you found in the pocket of the sweatshirt you’re wearing. (Dave’s sweatshirt, technically, but you’ve cut holes in it. That makes it yours, right?) It’s nice to hang on to something solid, especially something familiar from before the world turned inside out. You’ve run your thumb over its surface so often you’ve probably worn George Washington’s weirdly sculpted collarbones right off.

Back when you had powers, you played a game to pass the time. You’d flip a coin and freeze it right before it started to arc downward. (That kind of control is tricky: like recording a conversation and trying to edit out a single voice. As far as you know, alpha Dave never had time to master it. That’s what he gets for taking his advice from homicidal trolls instead of you. The Alternians didn’t seem big on finesse.) Once the coin froze in midair, you’d walk around it, peering above and underneath, trying to guess how it would land. Heads or tails? Then you’d let the moment go and see how things turned out.

Your success rate was barely more than half, which made it no better than guessing. The few times Rose played, she always got it right. Not much fun in that, so it didn’t keep her attention. You’d only invited her to play to get her mind off things, but any distraction you dreamed up never worked for long. When Rose gets something into her head, a brain surgeon with a pickaxe couldn’t get it out. In that timeline, most of her ideas burrowed deep.

She must have known about the player switch already. Maybe that’s why she was willing to bench herself, when you have a hard time imagining Rose taking herself out of the action like that for any other reason. It’s a trade any loyal kid would make. She’s not the main event any longer, but she gets her mom back.

In your timeline, when Rose found her mother’s body, she tore holes through the planet in her rage. Whatever it says about you, seeing your brother’s body pinned to the stone like one of your dried-out specimens didn’t compel you to go looking for revenge. Not that Rose needed the help. (You would’ve helped, for her. She didn’t ask. Wasn’t speaking English, then.)

You tried to help after going back. Why, you’re not sure. He wasn’t _your_ brother, any more than you’re in your timeline or even your clothes. And maybe that made it easier. You were two people who wanted to stop Jack, and you knew how to fight together. You knew his moves, what it meant when he shifted his weight like _that_ or twisted around just so, even if before you’d been the one on the other end of his blade. After Jack tore a hole in your gut, whoever’s brother it was shoved you out of the way. He didn’t do it protectively. It was more like the way he’d take the controller from your hands when you fucked up a level too many times. “I’ll take it from here, kid,” he might say. “Let me show you how it’s done.”

You didn’t care about kill stealing at that point. You’d had cuts and broken bones before, but you’d never felt anything like this – a pain that made you curl in on yourself like a personal black hole that gobbled every other thought in your mind. _Your_ thoughts, anyway. SBURB’s subroutines kicked in to plug the gaps: retreat, recover, prioritize the Player. If you die for someone, don’t make it him. The code bundled you up and pulled you down into the pendant hanging around your neck, but not before you saw Jack knock him down and pin him. Game over. You didn’t see his face, but he’d always been a sore loser. He would’ve hated that.

When you snapped out of emergency power saving mode, Jack was gone and the planet was no longer burning, but the rest of the scene was the same. Your blood splashed in glowing streaks on the stone to mix with the red. You didn’t stick around to be sentimental. The Reckoning’s timer was almost up, and you had a mission to complete.

In both timelines, your brother plunged his sword into the Beat Mesa before he died. It had seemed like another of his shows of pointless bravado. Now, you understand. He wanted to reset everything to wipe you and your set of inferior players off the board. To show you how it’s done. He may have tried training you to be a hero, but you’d never been good enough for his standards. Why not cut out the middle man? This is what he spent his life preparing for. This is how he can win.

Will he be different now that he’s the hero and you’re no longer in the way? Gentler, or at least not interested enough in you to be cruel?

Heads or tails?

You flip the coin, but you put too much spin on it. It arcs away toward the dark blur of the space around you, and you don’t see where it lands.


	23. Jade

**November 11, 2010 (Year Two)**

When you were younger, your grandfather would disappear. He came back eventually, after what felt like months to a five-year-old. The trips weren’t _actually_ for months. You hope they weren’t, anyway.

Before he left, he would sit you down in front of a problem like a broken generator or complicated schematic and say, “Show me how clever you are.” Then you would try to figure each of the tasks out: how to repair broken equipment, how to make meals for yourself, how to keep yourself alive. Sometimes, after you memorized his patterns enough to realize this meant he would leave again, and before you learned how important it is to always do a good job, you would make mistakes on purpose. “Come now,” he said, shaking his head over a tangle of smoking wires. “You don’t need an old man like me to tell you what to do.”

Making things and fixing them was satisfying in their own right, and it meant you would be ok the next time he went away, so you rummaged for fresh wires and started over.

Each time he came back, he would walk around inspecting the upkeep of the house and tell you how impressed he was by your handiwork. No one on the mainland had granddaughters as talented as his. You would glow at the praise and feel special, separate and skillful, instead of wishing you could meet those less talented children someday. None of them had such important jobs to do. It was important that you remembered that. That you remember that.

But after a while you would see restlessness creep into his drumming fingers and distance growing in his eyes. Then you knew that soon he would set a new problem in front of you and ask you for reassurance that you could be left alone. He left you alone forever eventually. By then you were a big enough girl to handle it. He taught you how, and you taught yourself the rest. You could be clever enough for two.

Jake never appeared in your life in a way that you could see or touch. He still found ways to disappear. You wouldn’t hear from him for months (and you were old enough to measure now) only to get a new missive apologizing for his forgetfulness. And that was fine! You couldn’t expect someone with his own life and real friends in his universe to spend all of his time talking with the young version of his grandma. It would be selfish to expect to be the most important part of anybody’s life. You are just glad he remembered eventually, and that he wanted to talk to you, not like… It doesn’t matter. Still, he didn’t get that from you. Whenever you received a message, whether written or on Pesterchum, you answered as soon as you woke up.

He’s not really your grandson, though. He doesn’t get anything from you but letters.

Now that you understand what happened and what’s waiting for you, you’re going back through his old letters looking for clues. Are the friends he mentions Rose’s mother or Dave’s brother? What happened to you?

You pride yourself on your quick response time, but you do have one last letter from him that you never got to answer. You only skimmed it before John’s birthday (so much to do, so much to prepare for) and now you pore over each line.

Ive attached the birthday letter for john, I sure hope it tickles his fancy. I wish id had a chance to be pen pals with him too. Im sure any friend of yours would be a friend of mine!

Look at me rambling again. I suppose i dont want to come to the end of this missive because you hinted in that way of yours that it might be the end of our epistolary confabs? Unless im reading into things incorrectly again. Ive been told i put the cart before the horse sometimes and leave those poor equines struggling to catch up. But i can tell you with friends like mine you have to keep those steeds raring to go or youll never keep up with the clever things they say.

Anyhow! If youre putting a pin in our correspondence for a while im sure you have your reasons. In the meantime i will "take care" as you suggested, although a true man of adventure is ready to face any dangers that might arise. I would tell you to keep a ready eye out but i know youre a resourceful lass who can handle herself.

While im making all these dubiously founded assumptions, did i also perchance intuit that you might be paying a visit in person? If so give a gent a call first so i can tidy the old place up for you. Dont take that as discouragement though, i would love to see a friendly face and i could use a prod in the rump to do some spring cleaning.

Look at me yammering on like this again when all i meant to do was send you what i prepared for john! Ill quit flapping my metaphorical gums now and let you get back to whatever secret shenanigans youre being so cryptic about.

Until next time (hopefully),

Jake

So much has happened to you since he wrote this. You imagine nearly as much has happened to him. John’s grandmother says they won’t have started their session yet, but they will soon. In a year, to be exact. The important date is what prompted you to go digging for these old letters one more time. You hope they’ll have an easier time than you did. There’s so much you still don’t understand about the situation you’re headed toward. Will he know that you’re coming? Will he be expecting something? Your relationship was so much easier on paper. Almost all relationships are.

Maybe if you write a letter imagining what to say to him, that will help once you have a chance to talk face to face. You uncap your favorite gel pen (green and sparkly makes any message more cheerful) and begin.

~~so i guess you are my grandpa as well as my grandson~~

~~dear jake, i hope you are doing alright~~

~~are you still looking forward to seeing~~

grandpa

This is a waste of sparkly ink. For now, you put the cap back on so your pen won’t dry out. The right words might come to you later. It’s not like he’s going anywhere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to my friend Gill for spotchecking Jake's lines!


	24. John

**December 16, 2010 (Year Two)**

You plunk out a chord and frown. Dave sprite works with sound waves, but you and Jade like to figure out music on real instruments first. When you started learning piano, you played around making up tunes for hours, smashing keys just to hear the sounds they made together.  Studying for real took a lot of the fun out of it. Your dad would sit next to you to make sure you focused, nodding when you hit the right notes. This keyboard feels all wrong. Its keys click down too easily, and the octaves are closer together than you’re used to reaching. You are doing your best to ignore those problems. After all, you certainly aren’t going to work on a group composition using the piano from your house. It would be way too bulky to bring up onto the battleship, and the bench is bigger than you need for one person sitting alone. The keyboard records better too.

You mess up another chord. Your fingers are used to stretching further.

The others think you are being self-important insisting that piano is the hardest instrument, but you know you’re right. Last year you tried to teach them a little, since Jade at least said she had always wanted to learn. It didn’t go that great.

“The first thing I ever learned to play was Heart and Soul.” You placed her left hand at the right spot and then mirrored her position an octave higher. “You play bass, so you can do the bass line. Here, it goes like this.”

She nodded along while you played and then moved her hand up to replace yours when you were done. You moved it back firmly.

“No, I was playing everything higher so you could follow along. This is where you should be.”

“Oops, sorry!” She let you reposition her fingers and then hit the first note. “Um, what was the rest of it again?”

After a few more tries with you moving her pinkie back to the right spot, Jade had the bass line going. And going. “This is kind of nice,” she said, playing it for the sixth time in a row.

“All right, your turn.” You didn’t grab Dave sprite’s hands. That seemed more like a sister kind of thing. “You start here. And listen closely, you have to time it right with the bass line.”

He didn’t have any trouble keeping time, which you should have seen coming. No matter how many times you showed him, though, he kept losing the melody halfway through. Instead of stopping or asking for help, he would start making things up in a mess of notes that clashed with what Jade kept patiently playing. “Maybe I should have started with middle C,” you said after he transitioned into something that sounded a little like the Imperial March. “Then we could use sheet music.”

“Middle what?”

After that, the piano stayed your territory.

Your nanna could play, but she says she’s out of practice. The rest of you are too, so it’s not like she would be out of place. “Maybe my young counterpart will have kept her fingers nimble,” she said. “You could add a member to your group.”

“That might be fun,” you said, although you’ve never heard of a group with two pianos.  She doesn’t seem to think it will be weird at all to see a version of herself who is still a teenager.  Maybe being old and dying once makes you care less about a lot of things.

Meeting your teen nanna will be all right, you guess. This version is nice enough when she’s not playing pranks like tying your hood around your ankle so you fall flat on your face.  Three pranking masters – nothing will be safe. But…

It’s not what you would have expected. If Dave is getting his bro and Jade is getting her grandpa and Rose is getting her mom…

“Listen to this.” Dave sprite presses a button, and the track so far plays. The notes you picked out on the keyboard (messed up chords and all) mix in with Jade’s bass and a bunch of electronic loops. It sounds cheery, like the kind of music they play while you’re waiting in a doctor’s office. Right at the end, it dips down and turns sour. Then silence. That’s all the three of you have finished so far.

“Did you change it into a minor key at the end?” Jade asks. “I thought we were using B flat major.”

“We were, but it sounded like a commercial for allergy medicine.”

You think that’s uncalled for, and you guess Jade does too, because she leaves her bass hanging off her neck and crosses her arms. “Making it darker doesn’t automatically make it better.”

He drags a finger along the mousepad, resetting the track. “This time it does.”

It’s like they don’t even remember that you’re there. “I liked the major key,” you say.

He snorts. “Of course you would.”

You rest an elbow on the keyboard in a discordant jangle of notes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t like anything complicated.”

In your opinion, he is way too fond of making everything more complicated than it needs to be. “I don’t think everything has to sound like a soap opera soundtrack.”

Jade interrupts, like she always does when the two of you start arguing, even if she originally would have taken a side. “If we can’t agree, maybe we should come back to this later. It’ll sound new to us then.”

“Sure,” you say. It’s the first time in a while that you’ve all gotten together to do something as a group, and now it’s over, but it’s not like you were enjoying it. The three of you hanging out always seems to end like this. If Jade actually let you finish an argument, maybe that would help, but you don’t like arguing either. It makes your throat feel all tight, like the air can’t get through the way it should, even though you’re a hero of Breath and breathing at least should be easy for you. That’s one more basic, everyday thing you can’t get right. Like having face-to-face friends, apparently, or knowing how to deal with your family. Like having family.

You did try for their birthdays last week. There weren’t any surprise parties like the one you and Dave sprite planned for Jade, which feels a lot longer than a year ago. Mostly the two of them were off on their own doing whatever they do when they’re not interested in talking to you, but you made an appearance and sang the happy birthday song, which is a great leveler of festivities because it makes everyone singing and being sung to feel uncomfortable simultaneously. No one had much fun. And the holidays are coming up soon, which you always complained about before – it was hard thinking up present ideas back to back like that. Then, getting to see them in person would have been the best present you could imagine. Now, you’re dreading when your nanna inevitably herds you all together for a group photograph.

Jade strums her fingers across her bass one last time, like she sort of regrets stopping too, and then she leans it against the wall. You take that as your cue to power down the keyboard. Dave sprite is already gone, since he doesn’t have a real instrument and it doesn’t take long to shut a laptop. You should’ve asked him for a copy of the file so you can come up with a list of future changes, but. Well. You’ll mention it to him next time.


	25. Davesprite

_Partial activity log generated 01/28/2011_

_05:15:32 Sleep mode engaged, set to do not disturb. Automatic override in situations posing threat to players at god tiers one and higher._

Wake up. Check the perimeter of Rose’s house, which is easy since it’s always daylight. Game constructs are supposed to lose interest when the countdown hits zero, but Jack didn’t. The ones that take out your doubles haven’t.

Sneak a look in at Rose. She’s a shock of white hair faintly visible in the tangle of her sheets. Darkness curls around her like an extra blanket.

Start – no. That’s not right. That was then. This is –

Now. Five am. Wake up on reflex. Remember where (when) you are. There’s nothing to patrol. Nothing can catch you, and even if it did, one of the gods would handle it. Roll over (not easy to do, with the wings) and go back to sleep.

_10:22:15_

Wake up for real this time. Check your internal clock; be pleased that you’re five hours closer to when it’s socially acceptable to go back to bed. It’s the little things.

Grab a lukewarm coffee left for you in the kitchen. _The galley_ , says your built-in glossary. “The galley,” you snark back. No one’s around to notice you talking to the voices in your head.

Find Jade. “Sleep well?” she asks. If she were anyone else you’d think she was being sarcastic, but she’s not anyone else.

“Slept,” you say, and she nods. Both of you know that’s an achievement sometimes. “What are you doing?” She’s drawing diagrams made up of circles and lines, each labeled with a jumble of letters. Abstract art has never been her thing.

“I’m trying to work out where I’ll place the planets we’re bringing with us to the new session.” She waves over toward where the lands hover, entire worlds shrunk down to globes that could fit in your two cupped hands. “Since we’re expecting four already in orbit around the new Skaia, I don’t want to disturb them too much. Still, considering how small they are compared to planets in our old solar system, I don’t think their gravitational pull should be that big of an issue.”

The letters must refer to the planets’ names. You see _LHC_ written next to a circle marked with _DB_. Dave’s brother? “I think you should stick us oldies together. Session solidarity.”

“Really?” She considers the drawing. “I was working from the assumption that they would be distributed evenly, so that would require a lot more moving around.”

So much for that idea. “You’re the planet expert.” It’s not like LOHAC is yours, anyway. Dave is welcome to it and its neighbors. “What you’ve got looks fine.”

She draws a star next to the winning diagram. “It looks kind of like an octet of electrons, doesn’t it?”

“Yes?” you hazard, and she laughs.

“Don’t you have any chemistry in there?”

_Search results for “chemistry”. Files found: periodicTable.png, LOHACchemComp.csv, … Open new window to view full results._

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean I understand it.”

“Here, look.” She flips over the paper and begins drawing a new set of circles and lines. “There’s something called the octet rule. Basically, a lot of atoms want to have eight electrons in their outer shell – their valence shell. Well, I’m saying they want that because it’s easier, it’s not like atoms want things the same way we do. Or maybe they do, and we just don’t understand them well enough yet to communicate that kind of thing! It’s kind of fun to imagine the laws of the universe come from tiny particles wanting things really badly.” She purses her lips, maybe considering the cuteness factor of a carbon atom. “Since atoms want to have eight, if they have too many or too few they try to give up extras or share or steal someone else’s. That's how bonds and reactions happen.”

You’re not wild about the subatomic world always being in a state of chaos, especially the bits that make up you. If particles are going to shake each other down for spare parts, they should have the decency to be visible about it. Your body gets too much shit past you as it is. “Nuclear physics is a big mixer dance, got it. Scientists dump a bunch of chemicals in a beaker and the nearest hydrogen atom yells ‘Paul Jones’.”

“More or less!” She draws in four more circles. “That’s why noble gases aren’t found in many compounds in nature; they’re already stable without having to make any more bonds.”

The diagram matches the planetary arrangement she’s sketched out. “So what, get all eight of you together and everything calms down?”

“Maybe! Life isn’t chemistry.” She cocks her head. “Well it is, technically, but there are other variables. Still, it’s a fun metaphor.”

It’s tidy, you think. Eight perfectly matched electrons, filling in each other’s gaps. There’s no room and no need for anything else.

Jade has flipped back to the other side of the paper. “Of course, Echidna asked me to take her wherever we ended up. Do you think she meant even after we win?”

You could speculate – ramble about all the empty space available in frogs the size of the universe, joke about what future NASA would think landing on planets designed to be video game levels – but John’s voice comes back to you. _What happens to you when the game ends?_ She’s never asked you directly. Maybe she’s an optimist. Maybe she’s guessed.

“Guess you’ll find out. I’ve got… stuff to do.” You jerk your thumb vaguely over your shoulder. “Keep working on your cosmic feng shui. Which element balances out black holes? I’m thinking lucky bamboo.”

_foreach my $value (values %sylladex) {_   
_eject $value ;_   
_};_

This isn’t stalling, you tell yourself, sorting through piles of junk dumped on the smooth metal floor. You accumulated all sorts of garbage working on Dave’s quest for him. Most of it is irrelevant now, but you might as well go through and decide whether he’ll need anything after the game restarts. You’d been putting the job off because it’s got the morbid feel of getting your affairs in order.

Now you pick up a smooth section of polished shell that’s been engraved with curving patterns like a wavy musical staff. Something pings in the back of your mind. _Reward for completion of consort task id #172. Relevant to the Seer of Light’s quest to restore life to her planet._

Remember. A hot beach under hot sun. Scrubbing fistfuls of sand against your skin.  Rose makes you stop and cracks a joke about Macbeth that you only sort of get because you’ve never seen the play, but wasn’t the blood his fault, this _is_ your fault —

“We’ll try again tomorrow,” she says. She would’ve been better at this than you.

Jade knocks around dinnertime and you call through the door that you’re not hungry.  “Are you sure?” she calls back.

Game guides don’t need to eat, technically. “Caught the spring cleaning fever two months early and I need to ride this wave as far as it’ll take me. This junk’s been piling up for years; I’m doing a favor for future me.”

“Future you might appreciate a full stomach,” she says, but you only grunt in response. She doesn’t say anything else, but it’s a while longer before you hear her walk away, and you think you hear a sigh. She looks tired sometimes. Because of you. You hate that.

Something blue sticks out from the middle of the pile. You tug it free and give it a quick once-over. _Component for cooperative fetch quest utilizing resources local to Heir of Breath and Knight of Time’s lands. Quest is optional. Reward: 25 garnet, 25 quartz._ You toss it onto the garbage pile. Everything useless will be pitched into lava later.

John won’t miss you. He’s made that clear. Once you arrive he’ll go right back to real Dave and pretend you don’t exist whether you’re there or not. Jade, though… She’s practical, more practical than you would have expected based on when you only knew her online. The first time you and John talked over each other and chorused “Jinx!”, she’d asked for an explanation. That led to a long conversation on superstitions while she argued that rapping your knuckles on a piece of wood couldn’t possibly change the outcome of anything except your number of bruises. Still, you’ve seen her fret over the hummingbirds that stun themselves on her greenhouse walls before trying to nurse them back to health with palms full of sugar water. She likes to imagine that the universe runs on tiny, invisible forces wanting something hard enough. When you met a crying half-ghost, half-girl on the battlefield at the end of the world, you thought at last there was someone who might need you. No magic swords would stop a meteor, but you’d always been good at running your mouth. You could spin your story and pretend until the timer ran out that the sky wasn’t falling. With any luck you wouldn’t even feel it when it hit.

She was the one that got you out of that, of course. She’s long past being someone who needs your help. But maybe there’s one last way you can protect her.

Close your eyes. Remember sitting with your legs dangling over LOHAC’s lava, Rose’s last message to you still blinking on the screen. Sweat trickles down your back and glues the fabric of your suit to your skin. You won’t mind making this planet someone else’s problem. You won’t mind making all of this someone else’s problem.

Time to go.


	26. Jade

**February 12, 2011 (Year Two)**

Visitors can choose many different ways to get to Echidna’s lair. There are the typical routes built for quests of pomp and circumstance, filled with carvings of the witch and universe frog, littered with puzzles you’ve already solved. But there also secondary vents drained of magma leading down to the reservoir where your denizen waits. Where she would be waiting, if she were awake.

You pick your way down one of these less ceremonial entrances cautiously. The stone has cooled, but it holds the memory of heat in its glassy texture and blackened surface. Warmth trickles toward you from deeper down the passage. If magma started flowing again, would you even have time to scream?

Your denizen won’t be awake. You can check by reaching out with your senses, and there she is coiled deep under the molten rock dreaming of whatever denizens dream. You knew this before you decided to make the trip. You just want someone to talk to (to talk at) who won’t be expecting anything.

It’s been so hard lately knowing what other people want from you. You thought… well, you’d learned about relationships from books and television, and they seemed so easy once they got started. They’re supposed to make people happy. But Davesprite isn’t happy. You’ve tried distracting him or sitting quietly and listening, but however you try to help it just seems to make him more upset. He won’t even tell you what’s wrong, exactly. He just launches into one of his long metaphors that leaves you forgetting where he started. Whatever is bothering him clearly matters, so why can’t he be serious about it? It’s so frustrating!

He’s going through a lot, you remind yourself. The brief time you’d spent as a sprite had been confusing and disorienting, and that was without a whole doomed timeline in the back of your mind. You need to try harder. To be a better friend. Then he’ll feel better. Valentine’s Day is coming up. Last year it was an excuse for you to eat chocolate and wrinkle your nose while John made arch comments about whether dogs were allowed to do that. You’re pretty sure it’s an important day for people who are dating, and possibly a good time to try some extra cheering up. You will have to do research on good strategies, or pursue the chocolate angle with extra intensity.

The passage you’re following links up with the volcano’s main vent. Once you reach that point, you float down to land on a spur of rock jutting over the glowing pool below. If this were regular magma you’d be cooked, you think, but SBURB makes allowances. At this stage you’ve stopped counting the number of scientific laws the game ignores. A few of Echidna’s quills poke out above the surface. Everything else lies beneath. The arrangement looks almost cozy, if you ignore the impossibilities. It might be soothing to lie cradled in the warmth of a planet’s core.

“Hi,” you say, sitting down and dangling your feet over the edge. “I thought I would stop by and say hello, even though I know you can’t hear me. To let you know I’m keeping up my side of the bargain. All five planets, safe and sound.” You raise your hand and with a flash of green they materialize to orbit your body. After a moment, you banish them. She’s not watching you. There’s no point in showing off. “I was wondering though, when you said to bring you along, did you mean all the way? Even after we’re done? What will you do?” It’s a silly question now that you think about it. If someone asked you the same thing, you wouldn’t have an answer. You were built for SBURB’s purposes as much as the denizens were.

You kick your feet over the open air. “Do you get to rest when all of this is over? I know you’re doing that now, but it’s so hard to get a good night’s sleep when you’re waiting for something to happen. Maybe you’re looking forward to having a real break as much of the rest of us. What kind of fun does a big snake goddess like to have?” You smile at the thought of Echidna wriggling through those colorful tube tunnels John told you about from Chuck E Cheese. As much as you enjoy the image, it doesn’t fit. Your denizens are there to be wise and mysterious. They linger at the heart of things handing out quests and riddles. They weren’t made for anything else. “Do you know what fun is?” That might be too personal a question to ask. You hurry on. “Or maybe you’ll have some job to do in the new universe. There are always things that need to be done!”     Since you were a child you’ve always had a next task to move on to. Each time you peeled a reminder off your fingers, your eyes darted to the next one. Now that your dreamself isn’t dreaming the years away on Prospit being flighty and forgetful, you don’t need those anymore, but you keep mental checklists or jot notes for yourself on post-its cut into cute shapes like paw prints and stars. What would people think if you weren’t staying on top of things? Someone has to, and no one else is volunteering.

Nothing stirs underneath the magma. Thinking through every word before you say it so you don’t upset two touchy boys isn’t much fun, but neither is not being heard at all. In a moment of childishness that takes even you by surprise, you pick up a piece of loose stone and fling it downward. It hits the magma and floats there, smoking. (Magma is dense, you remember. How dense must Echidna be to sink beneath the surface?) Other than that, the gesture doesn’t change anything. You should know by now that asking for attention doesn’t get results. And if it did, you might not like them. You doubt Echidna would be happy about being disturbed. She didn’t say what would happen to you if you paid another visit without an invitation. You’ve read plenty of fairy tales. Monsters like to eat little girls who go wandering.

(Not witches, though, or woodsmen armed with axes. You’d remembered Little Red Riding Hood each time you picked up your rifle to venture outside. Witches threaten little girls too, and woodsmen save them. Which one are you?)

Talking hasn’t helped as much as you thought it might. Gardening is always helpful when you feel the beginnings of a bad mood trying to sneak up on you; maybe you should do that for a while and touch something alive. Far overhead and two years ago, you dropped the genesis tadpole out of bomb-blackened fingers, all your hard work tumbling away. John’s grandmother has hinted that you won’t have to start all the way over when the time comes to make a new world, but it’s still a nagging memory of a time you messed up. Sometimes you wonder why you’re always stuck with lost causes.

Those are the kinds of thoughts that are _not_ helpful. Yes, gardening is a good idea. It’ll clear your head. You get to your feet and turn to leave. You can still sense Echidna’s sleeping form below you, so out of politeness you look back to say goodbye. “Sleep well,” you say to the silent chamber. “I’ll be here if anyone needs me.”


	27. John

**April 10, 2011 (Year Two)**

The old tire swing doesn’t feel right anymore. You used to be able to squeeze both your legs through with no problem, but now the fit is so tight you have to sit on the top and drape your legs over instead. Your nanna says you’ve grown. You haven’t been paying attention, but you guess that’s the simpler explanation instead of some prankster with a lot of time on their hands sneaking into your room and shrinking your clothes as some kind of extended practical joke. Another way to think about it is that life is playing a very extended practical joke on you.

This isn’t the real tire swing, of course. That’s on LOWAS, or on a tiny chunk of your house’s front yard miles above the planet’s surface. This is the memory of the swing in your dreams, so you might be able to make it bigger if you really concentrated. That’s not the point of memories, though. You’re going back to what used to be there, not making it fit what exists now.

You hop off the swing. To your left, the yard fades into the checkerboard pattern of the battlefield dotted with tall, colorful trees you don’t recognize. You turn right. There, instead of an alien landscape, the street stretches out through your neighborhood. No cars drive past. No one moves behind the windows of the other houses. What would you see if you tried to look in? You don’t know what any of your neighbor’s living rooms looked like before SBURB happened, so your memories can’t fill them in now. Probably walking through any of the doorways would take you somewhere else.

That’s not what you want, so you stick to the sidewalk. The route is familiar. There’s the crack shaped sort of like Florida, here’s the place where the slabs buckled up and it’s easy to trip if you’re not paying attention. You’ve walked this way a lot of times before.

If you’re serious about wanting to find your friends, you should try somewhere else. Dave and Rose wouldn’t remember your neighborhood, so they have no reason to turn up here. You could look for gears and lava or check the sky for glowing clouds. Or you could assume that those weird trees were from an alien planet and see if Vriska or Karkat is lurking nearby. That’s why you keep sleeping so much these days, after all. It’s the only way to get away from the same bright yellow halls and the same green blur overhead and the same people, day after day after day. It would be nice to see someone new.

You did find Dave a few weeks ago, or you thought you did at first. He was wandering through a maze of dark canyons dressed in a suit that looked like it’d been dyed by bright green Nickelodeon slime, and you were already preparing to jump down and make fun of him for his bad fashion choices. Then his body angled toward you, and you saw the splash of red caked down his front. That wasn’t a fashion choice.

You kept quiet, perched on a rock high above him while he passed by. Even if he spotted you with the blank white eyes hidden behind his sun glasses, he wouldn’t be able to fly up to say hi, not without god tier powers. Of course there had to be other versions of him out there, based on the way Dave described his powers working. You just… you don’t like seeing it. It makes keeping track of everything more confusing. Does he run into those other ones, you wonder. How does he feel about that? You’ll ask him, once you’re sure you’ve got the right one.

You saw a whole bunch of trolls too once, but they looked older than you, not anyone that you recognized, so you stayed away. That is just what this adventure needs, even more trolls. Thirteen-year-old John would have gone up to them and introduced himself by saying something dorky and embarrassing, like rambling about phone booths while messing with a clueless alien’s head and ruining Rose’s first impression. You don’t know what that guy was thinking a lot of the time. There is so much stupid stuff in your past you would go back and change.

All of those close calls have made you more cautious about wandering too far. In the bubbles, there’s no way to predict what you’ll find. So for now, you walk laps around your empty, familiar neighborhood. If someone finds you here, at least you can show them around.

You don’t hear the roar. (Other people will tell you about it later, filling in the details and nuances and major plot developments after the fact like always. It’s not like you’re allowed to ever know what is going on when important things are happening somewhere else, or even right next door.) You do hear the screaming. It’s from far off, but the Breeze is good at covering big distances, and here the distances don’t matter. Some of it is high and screechy, like the shrieking of practical effects monsters in crappy movies. That part keeps going. Some of it sounds like people. That part stops. A moment later, bright lines rip through the world. The sight doesn’t make sense – the sky isn’t a piece of paper, it shouldn’t be able to tear like it’s flat or it has an _other side_ – and the whole thing makes your eyes hurt and your stomach hurt and your head –

You jolt up in bed. The cracks haven’t followed you here, but your eyes sting and your insides still ache like someone keeps grabbing fistfuls of your guts and pulling them apart. It’s worse than the time you got food poisoning at the movie theater and missed the rest of _Kung Fu Panda_ because you were throwing up in the bathroom. This feels like your molecules are sick.

Across the ship you can hear that everyone else – consorts, carapaces, sprites, and players – feels it too. Nakkodiles clack their teeth together like an unhappy version of applause. Jaspers hisses, and you’ll find him wedged under a spare bunk hours later, fur still on end. Jade growls deeper than she ever has before, sounding less like your sister and more like something you wouldn’t want to run into if you were walking through the woods alone. Everyone knows the world is falling apart, and you are drowning in them knowing it, and this time you can’t wake up to get away.

You pull the blankets over your head to stop the Breeze from bringing you any more. The extra covering helps, a little. All that reaches you now is your own ragged breath.

At least you can’t hear the screaming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Made it to year three! And it only took... well, I don't want to check how long it took.  
> Unfortunately year three is not going to be any more cheerful, but it will be shorter (and with a slightly different structure) and then things will take a turn for the better. Hopefully work will calm down enough for me to get there.


	28. Fracture

**Davesprite**

The world shattering is what does it. You don’t see the damage yourself, since you don’t dream in the bubbles like the others. Even they don’t all that often, and you can’t say why. (Maybe something about the place you’re traveling in? Sprite knowledge wasn’t made for smashing a hole in the game and jumping through. In this, like in most other things, your stash of tutorial tips is useless.) John tells Jade what he saw and she tells you, but you knew when it happened: paradox space tearing open and sending sympathy pains ripping through everyone inside.

You’d been putting off talking to Jade for a lot of reasons. There’s some level of strategy involved, believe it or not. Jade doesn’t like to argue, but she doesn’t like to give up on things either. You don’t know how to convince her it’s time to give up on you. Not when the whole point of this is to stop hurting her. Mostly, though, it’s because you’re a coward. You haven’t had a lot of nice things in your life. You’re not expecting many more. So you act pleased when she shows up with a box of chocolates saying she alchemized them with a d20 to randomize the flavors (but you should chew carefully because some of them have dice now) and let her tuck your head under her chin on the days when moving feels like too much effort, and tell yourself, tomorrow, I’ll do it tomorrow.

The outside world butting in works as a wakeup call. You are going to die. You’ve tried to forget, tried to slow these three years around yourself like crystallizing amber, but nothing lasts forever. The game has to be played, and it will kill you in the end. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature. No point dragging things out. So you do it. Jade that day, John two days later. And it’s easy. No more awkwardness, no more white lies, no more trying so hard to be someone you’re not meant to be. You should’ve done this months ago.

After John’s reaction to your note, you’re not surprised that he tracks you down. When he storms into your room (literally, there are miniature storm clouds sparking in his wake) you brace yourself. You must really look like dogshit, though, because he hesitates. “I was going to kick your ass, but I’m not sure there’s a point.”

“My schedule’s open.”

He blows out an angry breath, and the portholes rattle. He forgets what being a god means most of the time. You would too, except you catch glimpses out of the corner of your eye, your mental interface spitting out hit boxes and stats and reminding you that they’ve gone so much further than you ever will. They can live forever. “Why are you _like_ this? What did we ever do to you?”

How would you begin to explain? Everything about John screams ‘protagonist’; he popped out of a vat of slime ready to play team hero. He’s never conceived of a world where he isn’t the main character. That’s a twisted way to think about your lives, but Skaia works in stories, and it’s been telling you since you spun those timetables that yours is over. Its prodding has gotten too hard to ignore when you can look at the blurry window rushing toward you and see the credits rolling.

He shifts his weight when your silence stretches out. “Did you even care about her?”

“Yes.” Your voice sounds distorted. You haven’t used it in a while.

You expect a negation, or maybe the promised ass kicking, even though it would be kind of hypocritical since he never made a secret of not liking the two of you together. Weird time for him to get invested. Instead, the clouds thin into a barely visible layer of fog, and he says, “What’s it like?”

**Jade**

You catch him trying to leave the note, of course. He has a hand under your pillow and jerks upright when you walk in. “Oh. Hey. Thought you were out kissing babies with the chess people or whatever they do on group Bingo nights.”

“They don’t have babies, remember? They’re made fully grown. It’s a lot less trouble for the war effort that way.” You _have_ been trying to calm them down; they’re agitated after feeling the world tear open. Carapacians are designed to fit within the rules of the game. They don’t know how to play on a board that’s been broken. “Did you need me for something?”

He edges away from the bed. “No. I was, uh. I was just leaving.”

That’s when you see the paper clutched in his hand, and the expression on his face, and the pieces slide together like finishing a puzzle you wish had taken longer. “Is that for me?”

You suspect only the knowledge that you could teleport him right back like a naughty puppy keeps him from phasing through the floor. “Uh.”

“Can you do me a favor?” Your voice takes on a sharpness that doesn’t feel natural, but you’ve been dealing with carapaces certain the sky was falling, and reassuring yourself about the same thing, and now this. It’s like getting hit by an oversized wave while playing in the lagoon. Maybe you’d known something like this was coming, but the sudden force of it still bowls you over, leaving your chest sore and eyes stinging. “Can you tell me that this isn’t what it looks like, and you weren’t about to break up with me by leaving a note for me to find, and now you can’t even admit it?”

He shrinks in on himself. He’s shorter than you now when he doesn’t hover higher to compensate. “That obvious, huh?”

As distant as he’s been acting, you can’t believe he wasn’t going to say it to your face. But you got to know each other through writing notes. Everything between you worked better then. “You’ve made a lot of things obvious. When you keep refusing to cooperate whenever I try to make things work, it does send a message that you don’t want them to.” That same uncharacteristic sharpness makes you nod at the note in his hand. “I would have expected you to come up with some dramatic gesture though. Maybe you wrote one down.”

It would be easier if he’d shout. Instead, he barely mumbles, “None of this is what I want.”

“Then who _is_ it about?” you snap. “It’s not about what _I_ want. Otherwise we could be having a clear and sensible conversation instead of you lurking around leaving notes because I’m not someone you want to talk to anymore.”

“Didn’t do a great job of that,” he says under his breath (he should know you can hear) “because we’re having the conversation now.”

Yes, you are. Even if you’d rather freeze everything right here, or rewind to firmer ground, there’s no way but forward. There is never any way but forward. “So, did you have anything you wanted to say?”

“I...” His eyes flicker down to the note. (Can he not even dump you properly?)  “I can’t do this anymore, ok? Pretending everything’s going to be all right when we both know –” He breaks off, leaving the nature of whatever he’s decided you both know unclear, and then finishes, “there’s no point.”

You saw a point. Even with a dead girl in your attic, you could sprawl in the grass and marvel at a butterfly landing on a flower. You squeezed as much joy as you could into every minute you were allowed. Why waste your last days moping? “I didn’t know it was a chore.” (And you’re willfully misinterpreting him now, which is petty and not like you, but can’t you be petty once in your life? Aren’t you allowed?)

“It wasn’t – You’re not –” For someone who filled your Pesterchum alerts with lines of text, he’s not always good at stringing words together in person. That surprised you the first time you met Dave on the Land of Frost and Frogs. You didn’t know what was hanging over his head then. “It was too easy sometimes. I’m not dragging you down with me. I won’t do it anymore.”

“And that’s that,” you say flatly. “You’re just announcing it.”

“I was avoiding doing this in person because I didn’t want you to freak out.”

“I’m not,” you start, but you are overreacting, aren’t you? You can’t remember the last time you raised your voice to a friend. Have you ever? It’s not right, it’s not sympathetic, but this _hurts_ , even if like a wave it’s been coming. “Do I get to have an opinion?” you ask, and he looks at you like the idea is ridiculous, because that’s what you’ve spent the last five years training him to do.

“Not really.”

“That’s not fair.” You want to say the words with heat, but they come out small, a child complaining that her grandfather keeps leaving and she’s always left behind. He used to remind you that things aren’t fair. They just are.

And this just is. He’s done with the conversation. Done with you. So he shrugs your last words off with a bitter twist of his mouth. “Yeah, well. Maybe the real Dave will treat you better.”

That rips a disbelieving laugh out of you, because after all this, the last thing you want to deal with is more of Dave Strider’s brand of bullshit, whatever shape or color it comes in. “Oh, sure. Maybe he will.”

The sarcasm is obvious, but he still looks hurt, and you still feel bad about it. Neither of you know how to end this conversation. You’re doing a messy job of ending everything else. But as the first sting fades, your well-trained nature reasserts itself. Jade Harley, always bouncing back. “If this is what you want,” you say quietly.

He doesn’t argue about who wants what this time. Instead he glances around, where some of his possessions (a tangled pair of headphones, a practice sword, a sheaf of doodles) have migrated into the room to mix with yours. The whole ship is like that, everyone’s lives tangled together like roots so interwoven trying to separate out the plants would hurt them. “I’ll get my stuff.”

“I can do it,” you say. A reflex. A lot of what you say is.

**John**

There’s a magic ring under your pillow.

That’s a traditional place to hide things. You didn’t grow up with siblings, and your dad was pretty good about not snooping around behind your back. (He didn’t even go through your chat history, although you did receive stern fatherly messages in your inbox reminding you about internet safety. It turns out that when you did meet your online friends, they were not the safety hazard you needed to worry about.) Even though you didn’t need to, sometimes you still hid things. In art class you made a lumpy clay mug with ‘#1 Dad’ painted on the side in dripping letters and tucked it under your bed for Father’s Day. (Then for your dad’s birthday, when you forgot about the first holiday. The dust washed out, and he still has – had – it on the bathroom counter stuffed with spare razors. It’s probably dusty again now.) The first time a classmate loaned you a comic with more blood and violence than your dad approved of, you stored it under your pillow, slipping your hand up to run your fingers over its glossy surface before you fell asleep. You wouldn’t be living a full childhood experience without some secrets.

Jade and Dave sprite won’t go through your stuff. The consorts might, but even they have gotten sick of selling junk the gods used to own. It’s been a long two years, and the gods go through a lot of Kleenexes. The value’s declined. There’s an economic lesson in there somewhere. You keep the ring close anyway. In a pocket during the day, under your pillow at night. Your sylladex would be more secure, but you’re worried that once it leaves your sight it might disappear. Magic rings do that sometimes.

They’re also historically bad news. You know that. But a ring that brings people back from the dead has to be good, right? That’s a good thing to do.

The others might want to know you have it. You should have said something right away. When you woke up on your driveway the ring had been in your hand, cooling from a desert heat, and you curled your fingers tighter to make sure it was real. If it was real, then the ghosts were real, and then you didn’t have to feel as bad about people being dead. You’d rather not feel bad about things if you can help it.

Inside, Jade nodded at you stiffly, and Nanna offered you another slice of cake. You are so, so sick of cake. “Are you feeling all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” you snapped, and climbed the stairs since you were in your house and you didn’t want to ask Jade to teleport you away. (There’s another thing you’re sick of – relying on your sister for everything, even if she’s nice about it and checks in on you every hour. You hate having to ask.) You slammed the door to your room loud enough that you were sure they could hear it. The hinges groaned – you never got it put back on right; thanks Rose – but you didn’t care.

Your walls are clean again, painted over with a fresh coat of white, but you couldn’t stand to replace a few of your favorite movie posters. ‘fool’, one says, in Dave’s bright red text. ‘Dumb kid’, in Rose’s. A scowling face is scribbled over a gallant Nic Cage in green. Lousy imps. Rose said you did it, but what does she know? You’d never touch your posters, and why would you call yourself a fool?

That day, you pulled the ring out and set it on your chest. It was something unusual, something that was only yours. No one told you anything these days. No one told you about Lord English until he started smashing up the world. Jade and Dave sprite didn’t bother to tell you about their breakup. (Not that you should have expected other people’s relationships to make sense. Nothing about them made sense.) Why couldn’t you have a secret of your own?

You’ll bring it up eventually. Keeping quiet for a while won’t hurt anyone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was so pleased my new headset for speech to text finally got here and then my desktop died, lmao. We struggle on.


End file.
